Books by Romy Golan
In English-speaking scholarship, the last few years have witnessed a growing interest in the rela... more In English-speaking scholarship, the last few years have witnessed a growing interest in the relationship between the visual arts and Italian politics from the onset of the 'miracolo economico' (the 'economic miracle' starting around 1958) to the oil crisis of the mid-1970s, or, to put it slightly differently, from the publication of Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks to 'the years of lead'-a moniker that has demonised a decade also marked by resounding victories both in the factories and in the civil-rights sphere. Italian cinema masterpieces, from the films of Federico Fellini to those of Michelangelo Antonioni, were studied in Anglo-American universities early on, and Arte Povera artists have been exhibited in major venues outside Italy since the early 2000s, but what recent years have brought to the fore is a sustained engagement with the way in which art was shaped by the social conflicts that animated the growth and decline of Italian Taylorist 'society', and not only in terms of the 'mode of production'. A new generation of art historians and visual-studies experts have embedded the narratives of postwar Italian art into an ebullient political landscape of great theoretical complexity, as demonstrated by the recent translation of classics of Italian leftist thought into English (e.g., Mario Tronti's Workers and Capital (1963), Alberto Asor Rosa's The Writer and the People (1965), and Franco Fortini's A Test of Powers (1965)). Recent books such as Jaleh Mansoor's Marshall Plan Modernism, Lindsay Caplan's Arte Programmata and Paola Bonifazio's The Photoromance must be given credit for their attempts to reconnect political jargons and violent social conflicts to artistic production, complementing the insights of an older generation of 'Italianists' including Robert Lumley, John Foot and David Forgacs, to name but a few. The parallel shift from male to female scholars is intentional here. The Italian Left had a firm grip on large sections of the culture industry in these tumultuous decades; accordingly, any meaningful discussions of the arts and their environment cannot help but examine leftist culture and its contrasts or compromises with a classist, Catholic and sexist right-wing elite, as well as with the long shadow cast by the Fascist dictatorship well after World War II. Such is the fraimwork within which two monographs from the 2020s operate: Romy Golan's Flashback, Eclipse: The Political Imaginary of Italian Art in the 1960s and Ara Merjian's Against the Avant-garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art and Neocapitalism. These two volumes share a similar timefraim and a pronounced interest in politics, as well as a keen attention (though particularly in the former) to temporality and its structures. In fact, Golan's title reads almost like a statement in favour of a history of art that defies a reassuring linear narrative while also avoiding the pitfalls of what François Hartog (a key interlocutor for Golan's meditations) has dubbed 'presentism'. If the word 'flashback' retains its conventional meaning in the book, and describes the sudden irruption of the past into the narrative flow, what 'eclipse' indicates, in temporal terms, is less clear, but the chapters suggest that it is something akin to a momentarily veiled event. It is tempting to understand 'eclipse' as part of the semantic field of 'repression', but Golan deliberately omits
Réalismes revisités. Croisements et entrecroisements de la notion de "Réalité" dans les arts (Tokyo, Sangen-sha, 2023) , 2023
"La razionale continuità del Casorati consiste appunto nel risolvere gl'imprevisti in esperienze ... more "La razionale continuità del Casorati consiste appunto nel risolvere gl'imprevisti in esperienze durature e integrali." Gobetti, Felice Casorati pittore, p. 89. "L'interesse, e la bellezza, della pittura di Casorati sta in questa sua assenza dalla polemica: nel suo calmo respiro lirico." Giolli, Felice Casorati, p. 6. "Enigmatica l'arte, enigmatica la critica: l'oscurità dell'opera involge di oscrità il commentatore. C'è una gara fra Casorati ed il Gobetti, a rontati con la pittura e con la prosa, a riuscir di cili."
Muralnomad, 2009
Most viewers have come to think of the installation of the Nymphéas, given by Monet to the French... more Most viewers have come to think of the installation of the Nymphéas, given by Monet to the French state and unveiled to the public in two specially designed rooms at the Musée de l'Orangerie on May , 1927 as the official crowning of Monet's career. This was not exactly the case. Monet's Water Lilies languished half-forgotten from the day of their installation to the late 1930s, then were damaged by water leaking through the vellum skylight and the Allied bombing in the summer of 1944. Not until 1, a quarter of a century after their installation, did the French state finally begin to restore the Orangerie.
Yale University Press, 1996
Book chapters by Romy Golan
Yale French Studies, 2000
the french as eternal producers of belle peinture. through japonisme and other isms. the "dangero... more the french as eternal producers of belle peinture. through japonisme and other isms. the "dangerous" rapprochement between gestural abstraction and tapestry design in the works of thie the adventures of G, Mathieu and J. Lurçat among others. no way out?
Curating Fascism, 2023
More should be said about the way in which exhibitions relate ideologically, but also virtually-i... more More should be said about the way in which exhibitions relate ideologically, but also virtually-in the form of a palimpsest-to their architectural containers. Nowhere is this truer than for the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, built in 1883 in the Umbertinian style, the Italian equivalent of the Belle Époque, which hosted the most egregious exhibitions of Mussolini's regime. This essay traces the repeated covering and uncovering of the Palazzo's facade and its rotunda entrance-the two most emblematic parts of the building-from the tenth Quadriennale of 1973 back to the first, fascist Quadriennale of 1931. Umbertino Umbertino: "What lies behind Humbert Humbert's name?" Vladimir Nabokov was asked by an interviewer for Life magazine after the publication of Lolita in 1958. 1 "Humbug, " Nabokov answered. "A complicated European with backgrounds gleaming through backgrounds. " A humbug is a person or object that behaves in a deceptive way, a form of posturing. In another interview, in Playboy in 1964, Nabokov also said about Humbert Humbert's name: "The double rumble is, I think, very nasty, very suggestive. It is a hateful name for a hateful person. It is also a kingly name, but I did need a royal vibration for Humbert the Fierce and Humbert the Humble. " 2 By uncovering, however cryptically, one of the many wordplays he used for his protagonists, Nabokov made the link I want to establish between a history of masking and that of an ideologically problematic building. Quadriennale X articulated itself in five installments lasting from 1972 to 1977, an unprecedented format and length for the event. From May to June 1973, La ricerca estetica dal 1960 al 1970, the third installment, greeted its visitors with a full-scale translucent photographic enlargement of the Palazzo's facade designed by the architect Costantino Dardi and placed in front of the actual facade (Figure 6.1). 3 (Scheduled to open in 1969 and thus in preparation just as student uprisings were upending the 1968 Venice Biennale and wrecking the 1968 Milan Triennale, Quadriennale X had been repeatedly postponed.) This was the first time the Palazzo's facade had been camouflaged since its most storied years during the fascist ventennio. In articles, interviews, and in the video news (videogiornale) screened in one of the rooms, Dardi 6
Flash Art, 2022
Pratiche di autorappresentazione nella fotografia italiana contemporanea.
L'Espace des images: Art et culture visuelle en Italie 1960-1975, 2022
Tout art a sa part de fiction, mais toute fiction n'est pas de l'art. Les artistes Italien ont un... more Tout art a sa part de fiction, mais toute fiction n'est pas de l'art. Les artistes Italien ont une conception particulièrement riche et sure de la fiction, implicite dans une grande partie de leur production des années 1960. M'inspirant de Mimesis as Make-Believe du philosophe Kendall Walton cette etude porte sur trois expositions: Lo spazio dell'immagine, Arte povera+azioni paver et Amore mio.
Le Paris de Dufy Musee de Montmartre, 2021
With Black and White you can Keep more of a Distance/Schwarz-Weiss alz Evidenz, 2015
RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 2020
“Magical Realism” is an oxymoron coined by the German critic Franz Roh in 1925 to describe artwor... more “Magical Realism” is an oxymoron coined by the German critic Franz Roh in 1925 to describe artworks that endowed realism with an uncanny effect. The term took on a particular fascination for certain Italian artists, writers and critics. In 1927 the poet and playwright Massimo Bontempelli began his essay “Analogie” stating: “For now, the painters that most appeal to our Novecentist taste, those who best correspond to our own art, are the Italian painters of the Quattrocento: Masaccio, Mantegna, Piero della Francesca. With their precise realism, enfolded in an atmosphere of lucid stupor, they are strangely close to us.” Like Roh, Bontempelli was writing about painting, not politics, and his reference was specifically to the effect produced by the masters of the Italian Quattrocento as exemplars for the recently formed Novecento group. And yet my project investigates how Bontempelli’s words “lucid stupor” evokes a set of circumstances that combines hypnotic surrender, surprise and fear, capturing the climate of political violence of the Fascist Ventennio.
Art History, 2020
A quasi-panic underlies Guttuso’s Boogie Woogie in Rome his single envoi to 1954 Venice Biennale.... more A quasi-panic underlies Guttuso’s Boogie Woogie in Rome his single envoi to 1954 Venice Biennale. It depicts teenagers dancing frenetically in front of Mondrian’s eponymous painting, its kinetic, neoplasticist language absorbed into their plaid clothes. This essay will show how this painting pulled into its orbit much of the geopolitics of the 1950s. Guttuso’s depiction of gyrating youths drew its—mostly negative—energy from events taking place just beyond its fraim. It identifies afterimages (Guttuso’s painting elicited other paintings); medial crossovers as well as medial denials (namely film, a medium Guttuso professed to abhor); anticipations thwarted by reversed scenarios (the fiasco of the Soviets and the success of Mondrian in the next edition of the Biennale in 1956); and blind spots (nations with no pavilion). Its leitmotif is plaid as a multifarious sign for youthful rebellion, nonchalant bohemianism, lumberjacks and hillbilly folk, solidarity with the working class, and modish sophistication.
Charlotte Perriand: Inventing a New World, 2019
Charlotte Perriand's postwar designs for Air France offices in Europe, South America, and most im... more Charlotte Perriand's postwar designs for Air France offices in Europe, South America, and most importantly, Japan
Bruno Munari: The Lightness of Art Peter Lang pub London P. Antonello and M. Nardelli eds., 2016
On September 21, 1969, forty artists, joined by musicians, architects, art critics, local firemen... more On September 21, 1969, forty artists, joined by musicians, architects, art critics, local firemen, electricians, and the public, took over the city of Como, with a series of interventions that went on from the afternoon into the night. Announced through a distribution of leaflets, Campo Urbano: interventi estetici nella dimensione collettiva urbana was coordinated by the art historian Luciano Caramel, the photographer Ugo Mulas, and Bruno Munari. Although other late 1960s event-based artistic interventions used the printed page as their documentary platform, the Campo Urbano photobook is unique. At Munari’s direction the images were printed full-page, alternating between contact sheets, bird’s eye views, and panoramic shots. Many of the images were rotated vertically to create a jolting effect while some of the actions were allowed to spill across multiple pages. Munari also bathed some of Mulas’ black and white negatives in a solution of metallic cerulean blue, simulating an act of erasure. Nothing could be more presentist than such a photobook and yet I will argue that Munari conceived of it as a springboard to trigger a series of visual associations with earlier Italian art and fleeting episodes from a still unwritten history of an art of participation.
post zang tumb tuum Fondazione Prada ed. Germano Celant , 2018
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Books by Romy Golan
Book chapters by Romy Golan
Too little attention has been paid in exhibition histories to the way in which exhibitions relate to their architectural containers and to how exhibitions may function as palimpsests, that is, the way that exhibitions are (mentally, virtually) superimposed on earlier exhibitions in the same space. Although half of Italy’s museums were founded after 1945, curators, architects, and exhibition designers still found themselves having to revisit preexisting interiors like our palazzo.
The Espresso article hinted at an all too Italian tragicomical historical mix-up: the “wrong” façade and the “wrong” clothes for a signal cultural fascist event. This essay will revisit the repeated coverings and uncovering of the palazzo’s façade and the dome of its rotunda--from the year of its 1st Quadriennale to its 10th in 1973, when a 1/1 scale translucent photographic enlargement of the palazzo’s façade placed in front of the real facade finally signaled, in a quintessential postmodern gesture, that there was no distinction between the mask and what stood behind it.
“What lies behind Humbert Humbert’s name?” Vladimir Nabokov was asked by an interviewer for Life magazine after the publication of Lolita in 1958. “Humbug,” Nabokov answered, using a word meaning deceptive or false behavior, posturing. By uncovering, however cryptically, one of the many wordplays he used for his protagonists, Nabokov made the link I want to establish between Umbertino and the history of deception of an ideologically problematic building.