Romy Golan

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).

In this fascinating and generously illustrated book, Romy Golan explores mural and mural-like works in Europe from the 1920s to the 1950s, beginning with Monet’s installation of the Nymphéas at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, and ending dramatically with Le Corbusier’s huge tapestries in Chandigarh, India.

Many artists and critics looked to the mural as a corrective to the ills of painterly Modernism: the disruption of the pictorial field at the hands of Cubism and other avant-garde practices; the commodification of painting through the market for easel paintings; and more generally the alienation of man and the anomie of art in the modern condition.

At the same time it was clear that a return to the mural format would never be more than an anachronistic and futile gesture. This book is therefore about mural paintings that are not convinced they belong on walls:  such strange objects as mosaics designed to be disassembled; paintings that resemble large-scale photographs, or photomurals; and tapestries that functioned as portable woolen walls.  The author argues that the uncertain relation of these objects to the wall is symptomatic of the dilemmas that troubled European art, artists, and architects during the middle decades of the twentieth century.

For most of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, France embodied the very essence of artistic modernism. However, in this original and perceptive study, Romy Golan argues that, after the First World War, traumatized by the experience of the trenches and then by the stranglehold of the Depression, France suffered a crisis of confidence so profound that it initiated a period of cultural, political, and economic retrenchment that lasted into the Vichy years. The image that France acquired of itself—as a rural, feminine, feudal, and victimized society—was not only reflected in the art of the period but was to a large extent fashioned and conditioned by it.

Golan argues that reactionary issues such as anti-urbanism, the return to the soil, regionalism, corporatism, and doubts about the new technology became central to cultural and art historical discourse. Focusing on the overlap of avant-garde and middle-of-the-road production, she investigates the import of these issues not only in painting, sculpture, and architecture (concentrating on the work of Léger, Picasso, Le Corbusier, Ozenfant, Derain, the Surrealists, and the so-called naïfs), but also in the decorative arts, in the spectacle of world and colonial fairs, and in literature. Throughout she finds evidence that artists turned from the aesthetics of the machine age toward a more xenophobic, organic, naturalistic art. This leads her to ask whether the famous and momentous shift of the avant-garde from Paris to New York in 1939 did not, in fact, begin two decades earlier, in 1918. According to Golan, it was in democratic France of this period, rather than in Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany, that one finds the most compelling demonstration of the hidden interaction of art and ideology.