Visions of the Modern.

This collection of 17 essays and a postscript treats many of the giants of 20th-century art history, from Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, and Constantin Brancusi to Andre Breton, Arshile Gorky, and Frank Stella. Having educated several generations of art historians at the Courtauld Institute in London and helped to organize many important exhibitions, most notably the recent "Picasso: Sculptor/Painter" at the Tate Gallery in London, John Golding is one of the most distinguished figures in British art history today. His essays from the last thirty years, many of them published in the New York Review of Books, have held up surprisingly well: they are passionate, droll, and fundamentally solid.

Golding, who is also a painter of the Color Field variety, states in his introduction, "My own response to art has always been primarily instinctive, and visual images still have the ability to absorb and hold me instantly." His ability to read 16th-century Venetian painting abstractly, not to mention his acute formalist readings of early-20th-century art, are very much in tune with the thinking of abstract painters such as Richard Hennessy. Indeed, in a review of Frank Stella's book Working Space (1986), Golding states, "Like Stella, I believe that most of the great art produced in the past forty years has been in the field of abstraction." Yet Golding's view of recent art is not particularly sympathetic: "A lot of contemporary abstraction is very bright but gives out very little light," he observes in an interview with Richard Wollheim. "Occasionally it actually cannibalizes the light around it. These works look wonderfully stimulating and alive when one first encounters them, but after a while one's eyes feel dry and drained."

However, Golding's art-historical essays are less dispirited; though dense, they are continually relieved by funny anecdotes, fresh reappraisals, and a sense of living involvement with the art of the past. His essay on Picasso's Gongora elegantly displays both literary erudition and a firsthand grasp of Spanish. And his book-length piece on Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass is still one of the most readable exegeses of this impossibly abstruse work. While carefully explicating its iconography, he suddenly wakes us up with a bit of British camp: "The Bride is a slightly absurd character, and she is not particularly likable; she is a bitch, a tease and a flirt."

Golding has a way of bringing the masters back to life by emphasizing their subtle ethnicities and quirks. His study of Brancusi, for example, reanimates our sense of the Rumanian's "White Magic" by exploring his penchant for Celtic imagery, his affinities with the 11th-century Tibetan ascetic Milarepa, and his unexpected '30s temple project for the Maharajah of Indore. Also embracing the esoteric in his essay on Kasimir Malevich, Golding explores the artist's involvement with Howard Hinton's The Fourth Dimension (1904), as well as his debt to the 19th-century German philosopher Richard Avenarius' theory of the minimal waste of energies. Of possible sources for Malevich's White Square on White, Golding writes, "As a small boy, when his father was employed as overseer in a series of sugar factories, Malevich had been fascinated by the miracle that occurred when the dark, raw molasses was fed into the machines to emerge as a white crystalline substance." Here is the kind of biographical detail that makes the vaulting achievements of high Modernism seem even more palpable.

Golding is not above the use of superlatives to make his case for the heroism of the early Modernist figures. He refers to Alfred Barr's Matisse, His Art and His Public (1951) as "the most satisfactory monograph on any major twentieth-century artist," and he rates Matisse's second Portrait of Auguste Pellerin, 1917, as "arguably the greatest portrait to have been produced in this century." Golding also has a taste for the slightly operatic set piece: Gorky commits suicide not once but twice in the author's beautiful catalogue essay for the 1990 Gorky retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. Yet Golding's occasional impulse toward extravagance is usually tempered by a more characteristic tendency toward concision, as in his two-page, boiled-down history of still life in an essay on Picasso and Juan Gris, which is a model of its kind.

Finally, although this volume is elegantly printed and bound in Slovenia, its paucity of illustrations makes the long passages of formal description read like tone poems. I also wish that Golding had included at least one reproduction of his own painting, so that we could more accurately assess the modesty of his self-revelation.

Brooks Adams is a critic who lives in New York.