Black Watch: Today’s Top Stories

Fortune’s ebb and flow is never more apparent than at auction. Joyner Waddington’s fall sale of Canadian art last night was no exception. A room full to the brim with several hundred players, punters and mere observers (including, oddly, George Chuvalo’s former manager, Irving Ungerman) attended as 221 lots went up for bids. Of those, 163 sold, pulling down $4 million-odd in the bargain. And while there was some anticipation in the press regarding two works from Black’s Hollinger collection, the response from bidders was varying degrees of indifference. Paintings by A.Y. Jackson and Marc Aurèle Suzor-Coté, at $75,000 and $110,000 respectively, realized prices well below estimate, and in the case of the Suzor-Coté, Black and Hollinger in essence took the painting back in hopes of achieving a better price at a later date. After Black’s puffed-up comments in the Globe yesterday, detailing his success in forcing Hollinger to share in the proceeds, this all must have come as something of a disappointment. In the room itself, as these lots came up for bid, there was no response of any kind beyond the odd murmur. At the other end of the scale, when a tiny Tom Thomson fell to the hammer at $1.4 million, the room burst into spontaneous applause. Fortune’s ebb and flow.