Romy Golan

Romy Golan is an art historian and professor in the Ph.D. program in art history at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on modern European art, particularly French and Italian painting of the interwar and postwar period. Before joining the faculty of The Graduate Center in 1998, Golan taught at Vassar College (1987–2002) and Yale University (1993–1998).

In Muralnomad: The Paradox of Wall Painting, Europe 1927-1957 (2009), Golan explored the transmediality of the mural image. The book looks at mural paintings, including works by Claude Monet, Mario Sironi, and Pablo Picasso, that were not truly convinced that they belonged on walls. Installed in unorthodox manners, these public works manifested an ambivalence about their charged ideological identity.

Her most recent book is Flashback, Eclipse. The Political Imaginary of Italian Art in the 1960s (Zone Books, 2021). Structured by two forms of non-linear and decidedly non-presentist forms of temporality, the flashback and the eclipse, this book argues that Italian art of the 1960s reimagined Italian (and European) history, but in oblique form. The reimagining occurred as modernism in the country was formerly aligned with Italian fascism.

Curatorial work Golan's curatorial work includes Encounters with the 1930s at the Museo Reina Sofia in 2012 and Avigdor Stematsky’s Late Works at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2008. She has also contributed catalogue essays to exhibitions including Le Paris de Dufy at the Musée de Montmartre in 2021, Charlotte Perriand: Inventing a New World at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris in 2019, and Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 at the Haus der Kunst, Munich in 2016.

Suppressed Brooklyn Rail essay In 2023, Golan wrote a commissioned essay for the Brooklyn Rail comparing Jeff Koons's Bouquet of Tulips with a 1937 mural by Fernand Léger and Charlotte Perriand. After the Koons studio objected to the piece and called it defamatory, the editors proposed significantly reducing it; Golan withdrew the essay, citing editorial independence concerns. The incident was characterized by several journalism and legal experts as a case of editorial self-censorship.

Works

Books Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars (Yale University Press, 1995) Muralnomad: The Paradox of Wall Painting, Europe 1927–1957 (Yale University Press, 2009)

Flashback, Eclipse: The Political Imaginary of Italian Art in the 1960s (Zone Books, 2021)

Selected articles and book chapters