Tanya Harrod’s books include ‘The Last Sane Man: Michael Cardew, Modern Pots, Colonialism and the Counterculture’ (Yale University Press) and ‘The Real Thing: Essays on Making in the Modern World’ (Hyphen Press)

What the art world gets wrong about craft

The growing tendency to fold 20th-century makers into the history of modern art often ignores what was truly innovative about their work

27 Feb 2023

The stonecutter who gave life to letters

Ralph Beyer’s idiosyncratic letter-cutting isn’t to everyone’s taste but there’s no denying its power

26 Mar 2021
Leola Pettway and Qunnie Pettway working at the Freedom Quilting Bee in 1972.

The Gee’s Bend quilt-makers are absolute masters of their craft

The quilts made in Gee’s Bend, Alabama are often compared with modern paintings, but should be seen as great works in their own right

4 Dec 2020
The Jantar Mantar observatory, construction of which began in the 1720s under Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II. Photo: John East

‘These remarkable examples of Mughal technology spoke to an India freed from British rule’

An 18th-century observatory in Delhi has inspired many architects in the post-Independence era

20 Feb 2020
Charlotte Perriand on the ‘chaise longue basculante, B306’ designed by Perriand, Pierre Jeanneret and Le Corbusier in c. 1928.

Style guide – how Charlotte Perriand designed the modern world

The multi-talented French architect and designer worked at the cutting edge of modernism

14 Nov 2019
Anni Albers photographed at her weaving studio at Black Mountain College in 1937 by Helen M. Post, Photo: courtesy the Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina

Anni Albers weaves her magic at Tate Modern

A major exhibition devoted to the artist restores her – and the craft of weaving – to the heart of the modern movement

20 Oct 2018
The view into the Painted Room at Port Lympne, Kent, with murals by Rex Whistler, photographed in 1933.view into the Painted Room at Port Lympne, Kent, with murals by Rex Whistlerinto the Painted Room at Port Lympne (photo 1933), Rex Whistler.

Why modernism was not the only way of being modern

A new study of art and design in the interwar years makes the case for a distinctly baroque take on modernity

19 Jun 2018