 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Norman Rosenthal" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(July 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Sir Norman Rosenthal | |
|---|---|
 Rosenthal in 2012 | |
| Born | (1944-11-08)8 November 1944 (age 81) Cambridge, England |
| Occupation | Art curator |
Sir Norman Rosenthal (born 8 November 1944) is a British independent curator and art historian. From 1970 to 1974 he was Exhibitions Officer atBrighton Museum and Art Gallery. In 1974 he became a curator at theInstitute of Contemporary Arts, London, leaving in 1976. The following year, in 1977, he joined theRoyal Academy in London as Exhibitions Secretary where he remained until his resignation in 2008.[1] Rosenthal has been a trustee of numerous different national and international cultural organisations since the 1980s; he is currently on the board ofEnglish National Ballet. In 2007, he was awarded aknighthood in theQueen's Birthday Honours List.[2] Rosenthal is well known for his support of contemporary art, and is particularly associated with the German artistsJoseph Beuys,Georg Baselitz,Anselm Kiefer andJulian Schnabel, the Italian painterFrancesco Clemente, and the generation of British artists that came to prominence in the early 1990s known as theYBAs (Young British Artists).
Norman Rosenthal was born inCambridge on 8 November 1944, the son of Jewish refugees Paul Rosenthal (born 1904 in Nové Zámky, Slovakia) and Käthe Zucker (born 1907 in Mühlhausen, Thuringia, Germany). Zucker emigrated to London first, in August 1939. Paul Rosenthal came with the Free Czech Army two years later in 1941. The couple moved from Cambridge to North West London after their first son, Norman, was born in 1944. Rosenthal's father, Paul Rosenthal, managed a Czech emigrants' club inLittle Venice. It was his mother particularly who nurtured his love of culture. When he was nine she took him to seeThe Marriage of Figaro atCovent Garden. Weekends were often spent walking from their home in north-west London to visit theNational Gallery andKenwood House in Hampstead.
Rosenthal was educated atWestminster City School,[3] London. From 1963 to 1966 he read History at theUniversity of Leicester underJack Simmons andW.G. Hoskins, author ofThe Making of the English Landscape. In 1965, at the age of 19, Rosenthal organised his first exhibition,Artists inCornwall, at theLeicester Museum and Art Gallery as part of the University of Leicester's University Arts Festival.
After graduation he returned to London. Seeking employment, he walked into Agnew & Sons Ltd, art dealers and print publishers onBond Street, and enquired whether any positions were available. He was given the job of researcher and librarian on the spot, beginning work immediately. Rosenthal remained with Agnew & Sons for three years, until 1968.[4] The following year, he won a German state studentship and left London to pursue a PhD at theSchool of Slavonic and East European Studies at theFree University of Berlin. Initially, his research subject was German peasant emancipation in the 18th century, but he soon changed his subject to art criticism of German Expressionism—for these subjects he was supervised by Francis Carsten andJames Joll. He was, however, not to finish his thesis: in 1970 a vacancy came up in the UK for Exhibitions Officer atBrighton Museum and Art Gallery, which at the time was under the directorship of John Morley.[5] Rosenthal remained in the post for four years and learnt a great deal from Morley.
In 1974, Rosenthal was appointed a Curator at theInstitute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London. During his two-year period at the Institute he organised two key exhibitions and made lasting working relationships, in particular with the Berlin-based art criticChristos M. Joachimides and German artistJoseph Beuys. Between 30 October and 24 November 1974 Rosenthal organised an exhibition with Joachimides of new radical German art calledArt into Society; Society into Art: Seven German Artists.[6]Art into Society took place as a part of a German Month of events that included lectures by critical theorists of the Frankfurt School of Philosophy.[7] Artists includedJoseph Beuys,Hans Haacke,Klaus Staeck, Albrecht D, KP BrehmerKP Brehmer, Dieter Hacker andGustav Metzger, whose work was to urge artists to strike for three years to "bring down the art system". Apart from a brief visit to Ireland, Beuys remained present in the gallery for the majority of the exhibition: he engaged in conversations with the audience on how to achieve democracy, sketching out his ideas onto numerous chalkboards subsequently strewn across the floor.
The following year, in 1975, Rosenthal again worked with Joachimides on the exhibition Eight Artists, Eight Attitudes, Eight Greeks between 5 November and 4 December. It coincided with a Greek Month to celebrate the fall of the Colonel's Dictatorship in Athens the previous year. Artists, includingStephen Antonakos,Vlassis Caniaris,Chryssa,Jannis Kounellis, Pavlos,Lucas Samaras,Panayiotis Vassilakis (Takis) and Costas Tsoclis, sought to "examine the facts of a spiritual as well as an actual immigration".[8]
As Director of Exhibitions, Rosenthal famously was beaten up byKeith Allen and his anti-establishment friends. To this day flecks of blood remain preserved beneath plexiglass on the ICA office wall. Beneath it, a title reads: "This is Norman’s Blood."[9]
In 1977,The Spectator published a short polemical article Rosenthal wrote called "The Future of the RA". In it he criticised the organisation for its lack of driving philosophy. It had fantastic galleries, but lacked money and vision.[10] Partly as a result of this article Rosenthal was eventually offered a job as Exhibitions Secretary by then PresidentHugh Casson.
Rosenthal's first exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1978, at the suggestion ofBryan Robertson, was on the American painterRobert Motherwell. It was followed by a major exhibition onPost-Impressionism in 1979–80, and in 1981 A New Spirit in Painting, an exhibition of neo-Expressionist painting co-curated withChristos M Joachimides andSir Nicholas Serota. Considered to be one of Rosenthal's greatest achievements, this exhibition foregrounded the work of paintersGeorg Baselitz andAnselm Kiefer, and set the agenda for a "return to painting" in the early 1980s. In 1997, Rosenthal co-curated the very controversial exhibitionSensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection withCharles Saatchi. Besides these two most notorious exhibitions, for with which Rosenthal is most readily identified, he organised over thirty exhibitions ranging fromArt in Plantagenet England 1200–1400 in 1987 toAnish Kapoor in 2009 (for a full list see below). The majority of these exhibitions were initiatives of the Royal Academy that travelled to museums in the United States and Europe. While still at the Royal Academy Rosenthal curated a number of exhibitions in Germany, includingZeitgeist at theMartin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin with Christos M. Joachimides in 1982, Metropolis, again at theMartin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, in 1991, and Nationalschätze aus Deutschland: Von Luther zum Bauhaus at theBundeskunsthalle, Bonn in 2005-6.
Rosenthal was notoriously unpopular with Royal Academicians. Many felt their work had been ignored by the Exhibitions Secretary, and was only displayed in the annual Summer Exhibition with which Rosenthal played no part." I want the best exhibitions. That's that," Rosenthal toldFiona Maddocks in an article for the Evening Standard in 1998. "OK. Strictly speaking all the Academicians are equal," he continued, "But it's an open secret that some are more equal than others:Tracey Emin,Norman Foster,Zaha Hadid,David Hockney,Gary Hume,Anish Kapoor,Tom Phillips,Richard Rogers, the 'Angel of the North man'."[11] In an interview on BBC Omnibus in 1997 he questioned the significance of the artist John Ward, a Royal Academician, and was felt to have ridiculed an elderlyVictor Pasmore. That month three Academicians resigned –Michael Sandle (who subsequently rejoined),Craigie Aitchison andGillian Ayres. Two cited the treatment of Pasmore as one of their chief reasons for going. The inclusion of Myra,Marcus Harvey's contentious portrait ofMyra Hindley, in the Sensation exhibition and Rosenthal himself were other reasons cited. In 2004, Rosenthal was nearly sacked byLawton Fitt, an ex-Goldmann Sachs banker who took the role of the Royal Academy's Secretary. "Fitt and two others sent me a fax saying my services were no longer required and I should find a solicitor," Rosenthal has said. "I did:Cherie Blair. My biggest regret is not having seen their faces when they received her letter."[11]
In 2008, Rosenthal finally resigned from his post at the Royal Academy. It is disputed whether or not he was pushed or left of his own accord. He stayed a further two years in an advisory role, curating an exhibition of Cranach in 2008 andAnish Kapoor in 2009. Writing inThe Guardian, art criticJonathan Jones commented that "The Royal Academy will be an infinitely poorer place without Sir Norman Rosenthal." “He turned a place whose membership and traditions give it a massive leaning towards the conservative into a world-class, influential venue for exhibitions of contemporary art."[12]
Since his resignation from the Royal Academy Rosenthal has continued to curate exhibitions and write on established and emerging contemporary artists. In June 2011, Julian Schnabel, curated by Rosenthal, opened at Venice Museo Correr. In 2012, he curated an exhibition of recent Baselitz paintings forVilla Schöningen in Berlin and also contributed a long career retrospective essay forWhite Cube Gallery on the painter George Baselitz. The same year he wrote on the painterRaqib Shaw forRopac Gallery in Paris and onJoseph Beuys for the exhibition Stag Monuments also forRopac Gallery, Paris. He is an advisor to the Leiden Gallery in New York, a major private collection of 17th-century Dutch Leiden School paintings centred on Rembrandt. He is currently working with New York-based curator Alex Gartenfeld on the exhibition Empire State, a survey of New York art today, which will run at the Palaexpo, Rome from April – September 2013. In May 2013, a major solo exhibition ofAnish Kapoor curated by Rosenthal will open atMartin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin.In September 2020, Rosenthal became chairman of theCIRCA Approval Council, an art platform based in London'sPiccadilly Circus.[13][14] Founded in October 2020 by British-Irish artistJosef O'Connor, they commission and stream a monthly programme of art and culture, every evening at 20:21, across a global network ofbillboards inLondon,Tokyo andSeoul.[15]
In 1989, Rosenthal marriedManuela Mena Marques, former Deputy Director of thePrado, Madrid, and former Senior Curator of Eighteenth-Century Painting and Goya. Together they have two daughters.
Throughout his career Rosenthal has been a member of numerous boards, these include member: Opera Board,Royal Opera House, 1994–98; board,Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 1986– 2004; Comité Scientifique, Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, 2000–05; Trustee, Thyssen Bornemisza Foundation, 2002–2012 (Rosenthal publicly resigned in protest atBaroness Thyssen Bornemisza's sale of Constable'sThe Lock[citation needed]);Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2004–06; and currentlyEnglish National Ballet, 2012 – ongoing.
Throughout his career Rosenthal has received numerous awards in recognition of his services to art and culture, including the Chevalier in 1987; theIron Cross Order of Merit (Germany) in 1991; Cavaliere Ufficiale, Order of Merit (Italy) in 1992; Officier, l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France) in 2003; the German British Forum Award in 2003; and the Order of Aztec Eagle (Mexico) in 2006. He was made an Honorary Fellow of theRoyal College of Art, London in 1987, received a Hon. DLitt fromSouthampton University in 2003, and an Hon. DLitt fromLeicester University in 2006. In 2007 he was awarded a knighthood in theQueen's Birthday Honours List.
Rosenthal made cameo appearances in the British film directorDerek Jarman'sSebastiane (1976) andCaravaggio (1986). He was interviewed by the filmmakerJohn Maybury inLove is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon, and played a donkey-ridingLudwig Wittgenstein inOtto Muehl'sBack to Fucking Cambridge.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| Artists | |
| People | |
| Other | |
