John Golding

Messums.Org are delighted to announce our representation of the estate of pre-eminent abstract painter John Golding.

John Golding was an Anglo-Mexican artist, brought up from early childhood in Mexico. Golding’s mother’s family was the first British family in Mexico, arriving in the early 19th Century before the independence from Spain.

In 1953 he saw the major show of Cubism in Paris and decided to write his doctoral thesis on the formative years of the movement;  the subsequent book won the approval of both Braque and Picasso, and became a cornerstone in Golding’s life. Although Golding was dedicated to his work as an artist, the acclaim for his initial book on Cubism inevitably drew him into academic life and he returned to the UK to teach art history at the Courtauld Institute in 1962, and was appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge in 1976. In 1981 the Royal College of Art offered him the position of senior tutor in the painting school. Golding’s approach to art history was very much conditioned by his own practice as a painter, which nurtured an understanding of art derived from intent looking.

In a career that spanned almost sixty-years, Golding was the subject of a series of one-man exhibitions at major galleries as well as shown alongside Bridget Riley, Frank Auerbach, Peter Blake, David Hockney and Richard Hamilton in seminal group exhibitions such as British Painting ’74 at the Hayward Gallery, and British Painting 1952-77 at the Royal Academy. Golding’s paintings and drawings are currently held in the collections of the Tate, the Fitzwilliam, and the V&A, as well as in public collections in the US, Australia, and Canada.

Golding was appointed CBE in 1992 and elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1994. Between 1984 and 1991 he was a trustee of the Tate Gallery.