John Golding

Harold John Golding (10 September 1929 – 9 April 2012) was a British artist, art scholar, and curator. Born in East Sussex, Golding spent most of his childhood in Mexico, where both his parents were settled. There, he met several artistic and cultural figures, including Leonora Carrington, Diego Rivera, Juan O'Gorman and José Orozco, who influenced his later artistic practice. He was sent to board at Ridley College in St. Catharines, Canada, and – despite wishing to train as an artist – subsequently read art and archaeology at the University of Toronto. While at Toronto he made frequent visits to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and on the encouragement of his professor, Peter H. Brieger, he moved in 1951 to the Courtauld Institute of Art in London for postgraduate study.

Golding became interested in Cubism after attending an exhibition on it in 1953, and wrote his doctoral thesis on the early history of the movement. This was completed in 1957, and developed into a book, Cubism: A History and an Analysis, 1907–1914, first published in 1959. Golding's work argued that Cubism should be understood as a realist movement, and that Georges Braque should be considered its co-founder alongside Pablo Picasso. He taught at the Courtauld between 1959 and 1981, when he moved to the Royal College of Art. He remained there until 1986, when he resigned to focus on his artistic work.

Golding's paintings included Torso , Light from Troy (1986), Pulse (1991–1992), and Arco Iris (1992). His early works often depicted human torsos in dark colours and bold brushstrokes. After the early 1960s, he transitioned towards large-scale, abstract works in landscape orientation, and an emphasis on colour and light. He was inspired by Renaissance painting, by the works of J. M. W. Turner and Paul Cézanne, and by modernist artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Mark Rothko. He was also a curator, who organised several exhibitions at the Tate in London, often in collaboration with his former students. He was made a CBE in 1992 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 1994.

Golding suffered from depression throughout his life, and believed that it may have influenced the dark colouration of some of his early paintings. He was the life partner of the historian James Joll, and persuaded Joll to shelter Anthony Blunt, who had taught Golding at the Courtauld, in their home when it was revealed in 1979 that Blunt had been spying for the Soviet Union. Joll died in 1994, and Golding's physical and mental health deteriorated. He made his last paintings around 2000, grew increasingly deaf and reclusive, and died of ischaemic colitis in 2012.

Biography Harold John Golding, known as John, was born on 10 September 1929 in the English town of St Leonards-on-Sea, near Hastings, East Sussex. He was the younger of two children; his father, Harold Samuel Golding, was an insurance broker, and his mother, Dorothy , was a piano teacher. Harold and Dorothy Golding, both English, had met in Mexico City, where Dorothy's family had lived since the early nineteenth century and to where Harold had moved in 1919.

The younger Golding was raised for most of his childhood in Mexico, where he learned English and Spanish. He attended Ridley College in St. Catharines, Canada, as a boarder from the age of thirteen. As a teenager, alt=A cubist painting of five nude women, abstractly drawn in various poses. , painted by Pablo Picasso in 1907After the war, Golding had wished to train as an artist, but was persuaded by his parents to study art and archaeology at the University of Toronto in Canada, While studying in Toronto, he worked as a set designer for theatre, He also corresponded with the Hungarian–Mexican painter Gunther Gerzso, to whom he confided his worries that the dark colouration of his own paintings reflected his depressed mental state. Following his encounter with Cubism, and after a year spent teaching in the American University of Mexico City between 1953 and 1954, Golding undertook a programme of doctoral study at the Courtauld. He wrote his thesis on the history of the Cubist movement between 1907 (the year of Picasso's ) and 1914. Cooper attempted, unsuccessfully, to have Golding's thesis disqualified for plagiarism: Elizabeth Cowling, later Golding's student and biographer, attributed Cooper's actions to jealousy,

Golding spent a year living and painting on Italy's Amalfi Coast, Among his doctoral students there were Christopher Green, who wrote his thesis on the French painter Fernand Léger in 1973, and David Anfam, who wrote his on the American painter Clyfford Still. He also taught the art historians Dawn Ades, His students in Mexico included the American painter Allan D'Arcangelo.

In 1975, Golding and Joll were the subject of From London, a portrait by their friend R. B. Kitaj. Golding persuaded Joll to shelter Blunt (then Golding's colleague at the Courtauld) in their Chiswick home. The press generally believed Blunt to have fled to continental Europe, and widely criticised Joll when his actions were discovered.

Work

Academic

In an obituary in The New York Times, Margalit Fox wrote that Golding was considered one of the foremost British art historians of his generation. His 1959 book Cubism: A History and an Analysis, 1907–1914 was one of the earliest major studies of the movement. Golding challenged the then-prevalent view that Cubism represented a divergence from the pursuit of realism in art: in contrast, he considered it a return to realist principles and better contrasted with Impressionism.

Golding argued for the role of content and meaning in abstract art, previously considered by some critics to lack either quality. His last book, Paths to the Absolute, based on those lectures, His Amalfi Coast paintings are expressionistic and figurative, echoing the works of Orozco, The second, which displayed works by Picasso alongside those of Henri Matisse, was also exhibited at the Grand Palais in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He also co-curated 1981's Picasso's Picassos at the Musée Picasso in Paris with Roland Penrose, and curated 1990's Braque: Still Lifes and Interiors at the Southbank Centre in London.

Published works

As sole author

As co-author or editor