[1] Golan’s first book, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (1995) posits a number of reversals between avant-garde and rearguard.

In a challenge to traditional scholarship on interwar France, Golan argued that neo-traditional belle peinture and modernist painting, cosmopolitanism and xenophobia, in fact often shared the same stage.

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.

[citation needed] Installed in unorthodox manners, these public works manifested an ambivalence about their charged ideological identity.

[6][7] 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.