At the vanguard of renewed interest in Maine's influential early modernist Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), author Donna M. Cassidy brilliantly appraises the contemporary social, political, and economic realities that shaped Hartley's landmark late art. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Hartley strove to represent the distinctive subjects of his native region--the North Atlantic folk, the Maine coast, and Mount Katahdin--producing work that demands an interpretive approach beyond art history's customary biographical, stylistic, and thematic methodologies.

Cassidy, sensitive to the...