CONTEMPORARY ART

Can photographs be yummy?

Current exhibitions in London show how photographs by Jeff Wall and Tom Hunter are inspired by old masters. but can photography do anything that painting can’t?

ARCHITECTURE

Betjemanic

The centenary of Sir John Betjeman’s birth is an opportunity to celebrate his selfless campaigning for threatened buildings.

Contemporary design

Inspired by Grinling Gibbons, self-taught carver Shane Raven is a consummate master of his limewood medium. Amicia de Moubray talks to him about his career and the unusual research he undertakes for each commission.

A new arts and crafts museum

Ever since C.R. Ashbee moved his Guild of Handicraft to Chipping Campden in 1902, the Cotswolds have been associated with the Arts and Crafts movement. Alan Crawford explains how a new museum, planned for a seventeenth-century barn in Chipping Campden, will celebrate the history of the region’s crafts – and their continuing vitality.

Remembering 'The Treasure Houses of Britain'

‘The Treasure Houses of Britain’ remains the biggest exhibition ever staged by the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Twenty years on, Jonathan Marsden, who helped to organise it, assesses the long-term impact of this spectacular show. Was it, as some claimed, a shop window of art for sale?

New museum acquisitions

Since its inception in 1983, the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford, has avoided making value judgements about the different uses of photography. Instead, it has acquired and exhibited the rich diversity of practices that characterise the medium, as Russell Roberts, the museum’s curator of photography, explains in this survey of new acquisitions of vintage photographs.

Why don�t you etch?

Although virtually all the great twentieth-century artists produced prints – ranging from etchings and woodcuts to lithographs and screen prints – the subject remains oddly underrated by many collectors. Martin Gayford, who last year sat to Lucian Freud for an etched portrait, explains their compelling attraction.

An exotic awakening

In 1926 the Newlyn painter Dod Procter achieved sudden fame with Morning, still her best-known work. Averil King explores the ways in which Procter’s depictions of women and of flowers were influenced by her experiences in Burma, Africa and Tenerife.

Fashioning subversion

Many of the clothes depicted by Paula Rego are part of a large and remarkable collection of outfits kept in her studio. In an interview, she talks to the fashion historian Sanda Miller about the central role they play in her art. Photographs by Derry Moore.