John Golding, an English art critic, scholar and painter who courted abstraction in every facet of his career — seeking to define it in the work of others and to produce it in his own — died on April 9. He was 82.


The death was announced on the Web site of the Courtauld Institute of Art. Mr. Golding was a former faculty member of the institute, which is part of the University of London. The cause and place of death were not made known.


Considered one of the foremost British art historians of his generation, Mr. Golding was known on both sides of the Atlantic for his book “Cubism: A History and an Analysis, 1907-1914.” First published in 1959 and issued subsequently in several revised editions, it is one of the earliest comprehensive studies of the movement and has long been considered among the most seminal.


In that book Mr. Golding refuted the idea, widely prevalent at midcentury, that Cubism represented a break with the realistic tradition. On the contrary, he said, the Cubist perspective, with its emphasis on spatial depiction from simultaneous multiple vantage points, marked a singular return to realism after the misty prospect of Impressionism.


In other writings — his essays appeared regularly in The New York Review of Books and elsewhere — Mr. Golding considered abstract art as a whole. Where some earlier analysts had characterized abstraction as being inherently devoid of content and even meaning, he argued that it was suffused with both. The historical drive toward abstraction, he maintained, was about the creation of worlds in which content and meaning were rooted in the artist’s masterly manipulation of color and light.


Mr. Golding was also a curator, and was known in particular for two highly regarded exhibitions in London. The first, “Picasso: Painter/Sculptor” (organized with the art historian Elizabeth Cowling), was exhibited at the Tate Gallery in 1994.


Writing about the exhibition in The New York Times, Michael Kimmelman said, “It brought to light new works, which in itself was no small accomplishment considering the artist, and demonstrated relationships among paintings and sculptures that had not been demonstrated before, or at least not so clearly.”


The second exhibition, “Matisse Picasso” (organized with an international team that included Ms. Cowling), opened in 2002 at the Tate Modern and traveled to the Queens branch of the Museum of Modern Art the next year. It explored the professional rivalry and prickly friendship of these two titans — they had been introduced in 1906 in Paris by Gertrude Stein — and how each man’s work was informed by the other’s.


Harold John Golding was born on Sept. 10, 1929, in Hastings, in the English county of East Sussex, and reared in Mexico, where his mother had family. There he was exposed to the work of the great Mexican muralists, notably José Clemente Orozco, and rubbed elbows with many of the expatriate European Surrealists living there at the time.


Mr. Golding received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Toronto, followed by master’s and doctoral degrees from the Courtauld Institute. One of his dissertation advisers was Anthony Blunt, the distinguished English art historian who was later unmasked as a Soviet spy.


After leaving the Courtauld faculty, Mr. Golding taught at the Royal College of Art and Cambridge University.


As a painter, Mr. Golding worked largely in the Abstract Expressionist tradition. His canvases, which were exhibited widely in London galleries in the 1960s and afterward, and in the United States at the Yale Center for British Art in 1989, often employed bold planes of color and strong verticals. (He had forced himself to do away with horizontals, he said, because, with their suggestion of horizon lines, they gave off unwarranted whiffs of representation.)


Mr. Golding’s partner of many years, the British historian James Bysse Joll, died in 1994. Information on survivors was not available.


His other books include “Paths to the Absolute” (2000), a study of seven Modernists: Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still.


Though Mr. Golding was long recognized as an authority on Cubism, he grew to believe that the movement was resistant to authority in every sense of the word.


“I continue to enjoy looking at Cubist pictures as much as I ever did,” he told the British newspaper The Guardian in 1994. “But I have come increasingly to realize that I do not really understand them, and I am not sure that anyone else does either.”