For the latest issue of Art History Journal, Anthony White discusses Flashback, Eclipse: The Political Imaginary of Italian Art in the 1960sby Romy Golan. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to access the journal or see the button to the left to read the full review. An excerpt appears below:

“Romy Golan’s new monograph is a beautifully written, deeply researched, and ground-breaking book focusing on Italian art’s relationship to history and politics in the 1960s. Golan displays great erudition and analytical subtlety in her investigation of the three groups of works which form the backbone of the book, deploying a novel methodology that concentrates on the historical and political afterlives to which her objects of study relate. Whereas much art history traditionally deals with what is closely related to the work at its moment of production – either in the contemporary historical context or in the motives and intentions of the artist – Golan turns her attention to events, discourses, and histories which lie at a temporal and spatial remove from the moment of the artwork’s creation and immediate reception. As in Michelangelo Pistoletto’s reflective paintings of the 1960s which, to avoid imaging the photographer, are often shot obliquely, Golan’s book generates perspectives slanted towards unaccustomed readings. The result is a creative, historically resonant study which overturns habitual ways of thinking about the period and the longer trajectories linking aesthetics and politics in the twentieth century.”