If you were the child of the late mother Asivak, you would not have inherited a black penny even if she had her famous drawing The enchanted owl was sold on December 5th for $138,000!
Maman Kinuajuak Asivak, who died in Cape Dorset, Nunavut, in 2013, sold the rights to her design to the Post Office for $24, which resulted in a postage stamp in 1970. Since then, her gorgeous owl has been sold several times without his heirs touching a penny. In Canada, there are still no resale rights for works by visual artists due to the reluctant government.
Here I tell you the beautiful (?) story of another artist, also native, who was a very good friend for years. In 1958 I became Rita Letendre’s neighbor on Harvard Street in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, Montreal. She began a career as a painter and, like many others, pulled the devil by the tail.
In 1961 she managed with difficulty to replenish her supply of paint tubes. By that year his ‘arsenal’ of paint was dry, having completed two large 152cm x 165cm paintings, one entitled ‘Poetic Engine’ and the other ‘Reflection from Eden’. Knowing I was building a collection of paintings, she begged me to buy one of those twin paintings for $150. I settled on what she dubbed the Poetic Engine.
ALMOST HALF A MILLION!
In 2005 I donated part of my collection to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, including this painting by Rita Letendre. At the time, the amount was estimated at $70,000. So I got the sizable tax credits, but poor Rita got nothing at all. A few months ago, the twin painting Reflet d’Éden sold in Toronto for $451,250, something Rita would never have known since her death in November 2021. Despite this sale of almost half a million, his heirs did not receive a “token”. ‘ as Séraphin Poudrier would have said.
This scandalous situation has been repeated in Canada for years without our Ministers for Heritage, Science and Industry moving. Let’s remember that Vincent Van Gogh sold only one painting, The Red Vine, for just a few francs during his lifetime. The work is housed in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and is expected to fetch up to $150 million when sold.
SPECULATORS CHEER
Apparently, the painting has long been in the public domain, i.e. freed from all rights. In Canada, a work enters the public domain 70 years after its author’s death, but until we revise the law – which Ottawa has had to do for more than a decade – there is no right to resell artworks. So Canadian speculators are having a great day and artists are eating their brown bread.
Currently, 94 countries have created this right. Most set it at five percent of the resale proceeds. If equal rights existed among us, Maman Asivak’s heirs would have earned $6,900 and Rita Letendre’s would have earned $22,562.50. As icing on the cake, the tax office would no doubt have received a portion of this, since the heirs would have had to declare this as income.
Meanwhile, our painters and the tax authorities get nothing from these sales, which bring fortunes to the art sellers.
