Six years ago, MoMA mounted its striking and unconventional show “Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925” which opened with the unconventional choice of four works by Marsden Hartley from his Berlin series. The whole of the series was assembled two years later at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin for a show that Roberta Smith described as confirming Hartley’s world-class status:

Before Jasper Johns or Jackson Pollock, there was Marsden Hartley, America’s first great modern painter of the 20th century. He achieved this distinction in Paris and most of all in Berlin between early 1912 and late 1915. There he produced a stream of paintings that synthesized Cubism and other European modernisms, mixed in non-Western motifs and mysterious symbols and culminated in his lusty, elegiac German Officer paintings

One of the missed opportunities of this season’s estates was the Berlin, No. 49 painting owned by Barney Ebsworth that was donated to the Seattle Art Museum as consolation for the estate’s decision to sell Ebsworth’s legendary American art collection. Any collector gnashing their teeth at missing out on one of the rare Berlin works still in private hands will rejoice this morning to learn that Sotheby’s has Ed and Deborah Shein’s Pre-War Pageant (1913-15) which was shown at Washington, DC’s National Gallery in 2010. There’s talk of one of these works trading on the private market for $20m or more. That might explain the $30m estimate. The rarity of the work, with Ebsworth’s example going to a museum precious few are left in private hands, also commands such a strong price. Here’s Sotheby’s release on the work which will sell in New York on November 12th:Continue Reading