Norman Rosenthal

Sir Norman Rosenthal (born 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, George Baselitz, Anselm Keifer 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).

Norman Rosenthal was born in Cambridge 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 in Little Venice. It was his mother particularly who nurtured his love of culture. When he was nine she took him to see The Marriage of Figaro at Covent Garden. Weekends were often spent walking from their home in north-west London to visit the National Gallery and Kenwood House in Hampstead.

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