Leeds Art Fund

Richard Cork is an award-winning art critic, historian, broadcaster, exhibition curator, and former Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University and Senior Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

Richard will talk about his new book The Healing Presence of Art: A history of Western Art in hospitals in which he explores the extraordinary richness of art produced in hospitals, encompassing work by many great masters - Piero della Francesca, Rogier van der Weyden, El Greco, William Hogarth, Jacques-Louis David, Vincent van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera, Fernand Leger, Marc Chagall, and Naum Gabo. In the process, he reveals art's prodigious ability to humanise our hospitals, alleviate their clinical bleakness and leave a profound, lasting impression on patients, staff and visitors.