Looming large in the cultural imagination as a wild territory to be conquered and the ultimate perimeter of human power, the seemingly untouched landscape of the Arctic has been an inspiration to artists from the Romantic age to the present. "Arctic," published to accompany a major exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, brings together a range of artists responding to the terrifying sublime of the Arctic, from Caspar David Friedrich to Sigmar Polke, Sophie Calle, Mark Dion and Joachim Koester. With contributions from geologists, historians, archeaologists and glaciologists, as well as a new essay by Geoff Dyer about the photographs from the nineteenth-century expeditions that provided some of the first glimpses of the region and its inhabitants, this catalogue considers the place of the Arctic in the history and culture of the West at a moment when the region is taking on a new significance as a threatened, vanishing space.

Ancient People of the Arctic traces the lives of the Palaeo-Eskimos, the bold first explorers of the Arctic. Four thousand years ago, these people entered the far northern extremes of the North American continent, carving a living out of their bleak new homeland. From the hints they left behind, accessible only through the fragmented archaeological record, Robert McGhee ingeniously reconstructs a picture of this life at the margins. He discusses how the Palaeo-Eskimos spread across the entire Arctic, explains how they dealt with sharp climate changes that drastically altered their environment, offers glimpses into their spiritual practices and world view, and speculates about their eventual demise.