Art Therapy
Art therapy is a credentialed mental health profession that uses the making of visual art, inside a relationship with a trained therapist, as its main medium. Adrian Hill coined the term in Britain in 1942 and published Art Versus Illness in 1945; Margaret Naumburg founded the American psychoanalytic line. The history and the profession are well documented. The outcome evidence is thin, and for physical health it is close to nil, which is why this page is marked mixed rather than robust.
What it is
The defining feature is that it is a single-modality discipline. Visual art, made by the patient, in a relationship with a registered therapist. That is what separates it from expressive arts therapy, which works across painting, movement, music, poetry and performance, and the distinction is worth holding because loose talk about the arts healing borrows the profession's credibility without its training or its evidence.
The naming credit belongs to Adrian Hill, who coined the term in Britain in 1942 while recovering from tuberculosis, and published Art Versus Illness in 1945. Margaret Naumburg's priority claim, which is the one repeated in most American accounts, holds for the United States only, because Hill's book precedes her. Getting that order right is the correction this page exists to carry.
The founding methodological split is between Naumburg and Edith Kramer. Naumburg's art psychotherapy treats the image as material for verbal interpretation: the patient makes something, and the therapist and patient talk about what it means. Kramer's art as therapy holds that the healing is in the making, and that interpretation is at best secondary. The field still runs on this argument.
The institutional record is straightforward. Elinor Ulman founded the first journal in 1961. The British Association of Art Therapists formed in 1964, the American Art Therapy Association in 1969. Hanna Yaxa Kwiatkowska belongs in the founding group.