This month, the editors of The Brooklyn Rail named Romy Golan’s Flashback, Eclipse: The Political Imaginary of Italian Art in the 1960s as one of the Best Art Books of 2021. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full list of picks. The Rail’s comments on Flashback, Eclipse appear below:

“The book I was most excited for this year is Romy Golan’s Flashback, Eclipse: The Political Imaginary of Italian Art in the 1960s. Golan traces contemporary art’s developments and events while Italy experienced rapid economic change and regained its footing after defeat in war: what is contemporary in a country whose modernism aligned itself with fascism? Stemming from an intuition that Michelangelo Pistoletto’s mirror paintings are not merely flat Pop experiments, but involve themselves and their viewers in the narratives that surround them, 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