Golding, John

Golding, John (1929– ). British painter and art historian. He is probably best known as an eminent scholar of 20th-century art, particularly of Cubism, but he has also made a reputation as an abstract painter. His early education was in Mexico and Canada, and in 1951–7 he did postgraduate work at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, his PhD thesis forming the basis of his book Cubism: A History and an Analysis, 1907–1914, published in 1959. This appeared in revised editions in 1968 and 1988 and remains the standard work on the subject. His other publications include a short monograph on Braque (1966) in ‘The Masters’ series and MarcelDuchamp : The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (1973) in the Penguin ‘Art in Context’ series; with Sir Roland Penrose he edited a volume entitled Picasso: 1881–1973 (1973), contributing to it himself an essay on Picasso and Surrealism. A collection of his essays, Visions of the Modern, appeared in 1994. Unlike many specialists in modern art, he writes with admirable clarity. Golding taught history of art at the Courtauld Institute from 1962 to 1981, and in 1976–7 he was Slade professor of fine art at Cambridge University. He painted seriously throughout his academic career (his first one-man exhibition was in 1962) and eventually devoted his full time to it. In 1971 he started to teach at the Royal College of Art and in 1981–6 (having given up his post at the Courtauld Institute) was senior tutor there. His abstracts are typically large in scale, with broad expanses of glowing colour; he sees them as ‘basically reflective or contemplative'.