Ray Bradbury 1919-2012

Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 45, has died aged 91. Fahrenheit 451 is one of my favourite science fiction books (and a very good film) about a society where firemen don't put out fires, they start them in order to burn books.

Bram Bogart 1921-2012

The Dutch-born Belgian (via Paris) abstract artist Bram Bogart has died aged 90. Bogart pioneered a form of abstraction that quite literally stood out. His thick gestural application of paint produced works that are more sculptural than anything easily recognisable as painting prompting one critic to describe them as 'canvases that were both sensuous and with the quality of rock faces' while also being infused with colour, light and optimism.

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.