John Golding is one of the most highly regarded living writers on modern art. Visions of the Modern assembles many of his most important essays: some long out of print, others first published in journals inaccessible to the average reader, still others which started life as lectures. Together they create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. A distinguished painter in his own right, John Golding taught for many years at the Courtauld Institute and at the Royal College of Art, and has held the Slade Professorship at Cambridge. He brings to his scholarship a particular understanding of the way in which the giants of modernism - Picasso, Matisse, Leger, Malevich, Brancusi, Duchamp and others - faced and achieved their goals and careers. And a dialogue between Golding and the philosopher Richard Wollheim casts new light on the origins and aims of abstract art.