John Golding 1929 - 2012

John Golding, who has died at the age of 82, was an art historian and abstract artist. He books included  Cubism, A History and an Analysis, 1907-1914 and Paths to the Absolute which argued that the best abstract art was not simply decorative but was "heavily imbued with meaning and with content", which he illustrated with studies of seven abstract artists, beginning with the early 20th-century Europeans Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky and ending with the post-second-world-war Americans Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still.

As well as teaching and writing on art Golding was also a fine artist in his own right interested in the exploration of colour and light.