Duchamp Was Responsible for 3 Major 20th Century Art Innovations
Nan Rosenthal, Curator Who Championed Modern Art, Dies at 76
Nan Rosenthal, a curator who helped bring the 20th century to the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, died on Sun at her abode in Manhattan. She was 76.
The crusade was middle failure, her sister-in-police Wendy Mackenzie said.
Over 3 decades, Ms. Rosenthal organized exhibitions and oversaw the acquisition of contemporary fine art, first at the National Gallery, which she joined in 1985, and later on at the Met, with which she was associated from 1993 until her retirement in 2008.
Neither institution had traditionally emphasized modern art, and Ms. Rosenthal was responsible for bringing work by a spate of major 20th-century artists into both collections.
At the National Gallery, where she was a curator of 20th-century art, she helped larn a number of paintings by Barnett Newman, an Ad Reinhardt oil and a pair of bespoke granite settees by the American sculptor Scott Burton, among other artworks. (She fifty-fifty went so far as to visit the Minnesota quarry where Mr. Burton got his raw fabric to advise him on rock colors that would harmonize well with the gallery'due south interior.)
Exhibitions Ms. Rosenthal helped curate at the National Gallery included, in 1989, "Box in a Valise," a collection of miniatures by Marcel Duchamp, and, in 1990, a highly publicized show of drawings by Jasper Johns, on whom she was a detail say-so.
At the Met, where she was senior consultant for modern and contemporary fine art, Ms. Rosenthal helped shepherd Mr. Johns's 1955 painting "White Flag" — the museum's starting time work by the artist — into the collection.
She did also with the Met's first painting by Robert Rauschenberg, his "Wintertime Pool" of 1959. That work was one of the serial of paintings the creative person called "combines" for their incorporation of establish objects (in this example, a wooden ladder) into the canvases.
Ms. Rosenthal also helped bring to the Met a large-calibration show of Rauschenberg combines that opened in 2005.
Amid the other Met exhibitions with which Ms. Rosenthal was involved were "Jackson Pollock: Early Sketchbooks and Drawings" (1997), "Anselm Kiefer: Works on Paper 1969-1993" (1998), "Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration" (2004) and "Jasper Johns: Gray" (2008).
Nan Rosenthal was born in Manhattan on Aug. 27, 1937. After earning a available's degree from Sarah Lawrence College, she worked equally a reporter for several newspapers, including The New York Post, The Evening Standard of London and The International Herald Tribune.
Ms. Rosenthal received a master's caste in art history from Harvard in 1970, followed by a Ph.D. in the field from Harvard in 1976. She spent much of the 1970s and '80s on the faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and afterwards taught at Princeton, New York University and elsewhere.
Ms. Rosenthal's offset marriage ended in divorce. A resident of the Upper Eastward Side, she is survived past her second husband, Henry Benning Cortesi, whom she married in 1990.
She was the author of several books and catalogs, including "Painting From 1850 to the Present" (1976); "George Rickey" (1977), well-nigh the American kinetic sculptor; and "Terry Winters: Printed Works" (2001).
In an interview with The Washington Post in 1986, Ms. Rosenthal discussed the showtime show she mounted at the National Gallery, "Seven American Masters." Opened that year, information technology featured the work of Newman, Rauschenberg, Mr. Johns, Mark Rothko, Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly and Al Held.
Her description of the impetus backside the exhibition offers a window onto the curatorial mind-set and method. "Nosotros accept remarkable Picassos, merely we don't have a funny Picasso or an angry Picasso or even a major synthetic cubist Picasso," Ms. Rosenthal said. "We don't yet have a Newman or a single Johns."
With this in heed, Ms. Rosenthal approached those artists who were living — and otherwise their heirs — to solicit the loan of works for the show.
"I wanted them to see," she told The Post, "how their art would look here."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/01/arts/nan-rosenthal-curator-who-championed-modern-art-dies-at-76.html
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