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Sir Norman Rosenthal (born 8 November 1944) is a British independent curator and art historian. From 1970 to 1974 he was Exhibitions Officer at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. In 1974 he became a curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, leaving in 1976. The following year, in 1977, he joined the Royal Academy in London as Exhibitions Secretary where he remained until his resignation in 2008. Rosenthal has been a trustee of numerous different national and international cultural organisations since the 1980s; he is currently on the board of English National Ballet. In 2007, he was awarded a knighthood in the Queen's Birthday Honours List. Rosenthal is well known for his support of contemporary art, and is particularly associated with the German artists Joseph Beuys, Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer and Julian Schnabel, the Italian painter Francesco Clemente, and the generation of British artists that came to prominence in the early 1990s known as the YBAs (Young British Artists).
Rosenthal was educated at Westminster City School, London. From 1963 to 1966 he read History at the University of Leicester under Jack Simmons and W.G. Hoskins, author of The Making of the English Landscape. In 1965, at the age of 19, Rosenthal organised his first exhibition, Artists in Cornwall, at the Leicester 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 on Bond 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. The following year, he won a German state studentship and left London to pursue a PhD at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the Free 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 and James Joll. He was, however, not to finish his thesis: in 1970 a vacancy came up in the UK for Exhibitions Officer at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, which at the time was under the directorship of John Morley. Rosenthal remained in the post for four years and learnt a great deal from Morley.
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, including Stephen 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".
As Director of Exhibitions, Rosenthal famously was beaten up by Keith 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."
Rosenthal's first exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1978, at the suggestion of Bryan Robertson, was on the American painter Robert Motherwell. It was followed by a major exhibition on Post-Impressionism in 1979–80, and in 1981 A New Spirit in Painting, an exhibition of neo-Expressionist painting co-curated with Christos M Joachimides and Sir Nicholas Serota. Considered to be one of Rosenthal's greatest achievements, this exhibition foregrounded the work of painters Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer, and set the agenda for a "return to painting" in the early 1980s. In 1997, Rosenthal co-curated the very controversial exhibition with Charles Saatchi. Besides these two most notorious exhibitions, for with which Rosenthal is most readily identified, he organised over thirty exhibitions ranging from Art in Plantagenet England 1200–1400 in 1987 to Anish 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, including Zeitgeist at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin with Christos M. Joachimides in 1982, Metropolis, again at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, in 1991, and Nationalschätze aus Deutschland: Von Luther zum Bauhaus at the Bundeskunsthalle, 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 told Fiona 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'." 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 elderly Victor Pasmore. That month three Academicians resigned – Michael Sandle (who subsequently rejoined), Craigie Aitchison and Gillian Ayres. Two cited the treatment of Pasmore as one of their chief reasons for going. The inclusion of Myra, Marcus Harvey's contentious portrait of Myra Hindley, in the Sensation exhibition and Rosenthal himself were other reasons cited. In 2004, Rosenthal was nearly sacked by Lawton 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."
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 and Anish Kapoor in 2009. Writing in The Guardian, art critic Jonathan 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."
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