“An unprecedented study of Italian artworks” --Maria Antonella Pelizzari

"The book I was most excited for this year is Romy Golan’s Flashback, Eclipse.... Golan uses archival imagery and the journalistic coverage of installations and performances to uncover histories that may have been hidden for non-Italians or for those not wholly versed in Italian postwar art...Though she writes of art in Venice and Rome, her book also takes us outside of those centers to cities like Como and Torino, so evocative of the period and place that I pictured myself reading it while sipping a bicerin on the Piazza della Consolata."--Amanda Gluibizzi, Brooklyn Rail

"Golan weaves a complex and significant narrative about the ways in which Italy’s past affected the art of the 1960s. Her book offers an important model by which other scholars might begin to look more critically at the ambiguities of the afterlives of fascism in Italy."--Katie M.J. Larson, caa.reviews

This masterful book reveals the richness and complexity of a polycentric, dispersed, even anarchic art scene―the Italy of the 1960s―that no institution was powerful enough to unify, label, and export. It was known that Italy had been the laboratory of some of the most radical political experiments of the twentieth century, for better or for worse. Here we discover that, around 1968, it delivered the unexpected elements of a new political economy of the arts.”--Patricia Falguières, Professor of Renaissance Studies, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales

Flashback, Eclipse is a groundbreaking study of 1960s Italian art and its troubled but also resourceful relation to the history and politics of the first part of the twentieth century and the aftermath of World War II. Most analyses have treated the 1960s in Italy as the decade of “presentism” par excellence, a political decade but one liberated from history. Romy Golan, however, makes the counterargument that 1960s Italian artists did not forget Italian and European history but rather reimagined it in oblique form. Her book identifies and explores this imaginary through two forms of nonlinear and decidedly nonpresentist forms of temporality — the flashback and the eclipse. In view of the photographic and filmic nature of these two concepts, the book’s analysis is largely mediated by black-and-white images culled from art, design, and architecture magazines, photo books, film stills, and exhibition documentation.

The book begins in Turin with Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Mirror Paintings; moves on to Campo urbano, a one-day event in the city of Como; and ends with the Vitalità del Negativo exhibition in Rome. What is being recalled and at other moments occluded are not only episodes of Italian nationalism and Fascism but also various liberatory moments of political and cultural resistance. The book’s main protagonists are, in order of appearance, artists Michelangelo Pistoletto and Giosetta Fioroni, photographer Ugo Mulas, Ettore Sottsass (as critic rather than designer), graphic designer Bruno Munari, curators Luciano Caramel and Achille Bonito Oliva, architect Piero Sartogo, Carla Lonzi (as artist as much as critic), filmmakers Michelangelo Antonioni and Bernardo Bertolucci, and, in flashback among the departed, painter Felice Casorati, writer Massimo Bontempelli, art historian Aby Warburg, architect Giuseppe Terragni, and Renaissance friar-philosopher-mathematician Giordano Bruno (as patron saint of the sixty-eighters).

Romy Golan
Romy Golan is Professor of Art History at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars and Muralnomad: The Paradox of Wall Painting, Europe 1927–1957.