Arts news

• The Guardian view on art and health: the masterpiece can cure the body as well as the soul | Editorial

  02-11-2025 18:25
  From a Van Gogh self-portrait to Gauguin’s dreamscapes, new studies show that seeing original art can calm stress and boost healthIn an era characterised by burnout and doomscrolling, a therapeutic alternative is hanging on a gallery wall. When volunteers at London’s Courtauld Gallery stood before Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait With Bandaged Ear, Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère, and Gauguin’s Te Rerioa, their stress and inflammation levels dropped compared with t
  
  Read more

• John Langton obituary

  02-11-2025 17:58
  John Langton, who has died aged 92, was at home in the English art world. He made art, talked about art, and wrote about art for magazines and newspapers, including the Guardian. He received public commissions from the Universities of Durham, Sussex and York. Yet his chief success stemmed from his fascination with Germany – its history, people and culture.From 1971 he took part in 17 shows in West Germany, 12 of which were solo exhibitions. Unexpected in this robust career was the tenderne
  
  Read more

• Does going to an art gallery make you less stressed? | Letters

  02-11-2025 17:48
  Guardian readers respond to a study claiming the benefits of viewing works of art“The research clearly shows the stress-reducing properties of viewing original art,” says Dr Tony Wood of King’s College London (Picture of health: going to art galleries can improve wellbeing, study reveals, 28 October). I dispute this interpretation as the study was clearly not designed to allow for the stress-reducing differential between the environments in which participants viewed original ar
  
  Read more

• Paintings by UK pioneer of abstract art to be displayed in West Country

  02-11-2025 17:00
  Large-scale William Scott works feature in exhibition that tells story of artist’s friendship with Mark RothkoThe story of how one of the UK’s great abstract painters was inspired by ordinariness – and the extraordinary meeting he had with an American artistic giant – is being told in a new exhibition in the West Country.Three large-scale paintings by William Scott (1913 –1989) have been loaned to the Museum of Somerset in Taunton, not far from the artist’s ho
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

Follow @ArtsUK1 on Twitter!