Between 1900 and 1940, a group of modernist artists gathered regularly on the coast of Maine in a region then known as Seguinland. For photographer Paul Strand, painter Marsden Hartley, sculptor Gaston Lachaise, and others, it was a way to escape market-driven, competitive, and divisive New York City, and celebrate a new kind of American Modernism. In this beautifully illustrated book, Libby Bischof and Susan Danly explore the state's important place in the history of modern art and show how summers in Seguinland inspired a new classicism that merged the antique with the modern. They also shed light on how the various artists' experiences in the refreshing atmosphere on the Maine coast cemented their friendships, shaped their individual styles, and fostered their understanding of what it meant to be a modern artist. Published in association with the Portland Museum of Art, Maine Exhibition Schedule: Portland Museum of Art, Maine (06/04/2011 - 09/11/2011)

Founded in 1836, the Maine State Museum is America’s oldest state museum and is known to many as “Maine’s Smithsonian” because of the breadth and diversity of its holdings—nearly a million objects covering every aspect of the state’s cultural, biological, and geological history—and the thousands of stories its collections tell. For this book the museum selected and photographed 112 artifacts and specimens that, together, tell an epic story of the land and its people from prehistoric times to the present. It is a story covering 395 million years, a story told with a walrus skull and fossils, tourmaline and spear points, mammoth tusks and bone fishhooks, Norse coins and caulking irons, militia flags and survey stakes, treaty documents and wooden tankards, a temperance banner and a locomotive, Joshua Chamberlain’s pistol and a cod tub trawl, a Lombard log hauler and a woman’s WWII welding outfit, L. L. Bean boots and German POW snowshoes, and many more objects from the museum’s collections. Short narratives written by museum curators are woven around each item—including photos of related objects—and the ensemble has been honed, polished, and introduced by museum director Bernard Fishman. This is a book that historians and Maine residents and visitors will delve into again and again, unearthing new treasures with each reading.

Marsden Hartley had a lifelong personal and aesthetic engagement with Maine, where he was born in 1877 and where he died at age sixty-six. As an important member of the artistic circle promoted by Alfred Stieglitz, Hartley began his career by painting the mountains of western Maine. He subsequently led a peripatetic life, traveling throughout Europe and North America and only occasionally visiting his native state. By midlife, however, his itinerant existence had taken an emotional toll, and he confided to Stieglitz that he wanted “so earnestly a ‘place’ to be.” Finally returning to the state in his later years, he transformed his identity from urbane sophisticate to “the painter from Maine.” But while Maine has played a clear and defining role in Hartley’s art, not until now has this relationship been studied with the breadth and richness it warrants. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana} Marsden Hartley’s Maine is the first in-depth discussion of Hartley’s complex and shifting relationship to his native state. Illustrated with works from throughout the painter’s career, it provides a nuanced understanding of Hartley’s artistic range, from the exhilarating Post-Impressionist landscapes of his early years to the late, roughly rendered paintings of Maine and its people. The absorbing essays examine Hartley’s view of Maine as a place of light and darkness whose spirit imbued his art, which encompassed buoyant coastal views, mournful mountain vistas, and portraits of Mainers. An illustrated chronology provides an overview of Hartley’s life, juxtaposing major personal incidents with concurrent events in Maine’s history. For Hartley, who was strongly influenced by such artists as Paul Cézanne, Winslow Homer, and Albert Pinkham Ryder, Maine was an enduring source of inspiration, one powerfully intertwined with his past, his cultural milieu, and his desire to create a regional expression of American modernism.

Over the last two decades or so, the field of comparative law has been increasingly interested in issues of globalisation and Eurocentrism. This book inscribes itself within the debates that have arisen on these issues and aims to provide a greater understanding of the ways in which the “non-West” is constructed in Euro-American comparative law. Approaching knowledge production from an interdisciplinary and critical perspective, the book puts emphasis on the governance implications of the field.

The contributions of Bill Moss to mid-twentieth-century American culture were manifold. First changing the world of camping with the invention of the Pop tent, he went on to shake the world of fabric architecture with the many forms that we now take for granted. Lavishly illustrated with historic photographs, the book chronicles Moss' creative life from his early years until his death in 1994. It has a broad appeal as it encompasses many aspects of our cultural history--from architecture & design to biography to the complete transformation of the camping experience. Woven into this tale is the story of an award-winning Maine company, Moss Inc. Engaged in the creative economy long before most people used the term, it was also known as being one of most socially responsible businesses in the country, a reputation that held fast up until its sale by CEO Marilyn Moss in 2001.

Maine has always played a rich and varied role in the art of photography. For hundreds of years, photographers, like other artists, have made their way to Maine to capture the natural beauty and human culture of the state. So, too, have many photographers come from Maine, and many contributions by Mainers have been made to the medium. Maine in Photography is the first comprehensive overview of the history of photography in the state. Providing basic knowledge of the most important people and institutions to have promoted photography, this volume also studies the ways in which photography has informed the understanding of the social and cultural history of Maine. Beginning with the earliest daguerreotype portraits of the 1840s, this history traces the growth of the medium—emphasizing key contributions, such as the Stanley brothers’ invention of the dry plate process—through to the present. Key topics addressed throughout the book include the importance of photography in documenting labor and economic life, the close relationship between photography and the growth of tourism, and the role of Maine photographers in advancing the medium as a fine art form. Published in conjunction with the Maine Photo Project, this is a unique and timely addition to the body of work on the importance of Maine to American art.