Rosenberg embraced a bohemian lifestyle upon contracting osteomyelitis shortly after attaining his degree; the condition ultimately necessitated his use of a cane for the rest of his life.
[3] Throughout the 1930s, Rosenberg embraced Marxism and contributed to such publications as Partisan Review, The New Masses, Poetry and Art Front, which he briefly edited.
[2] Rosenberg wrote several books on art theory, and monographs on Willem de Kooning, Saul Steinberg, and Arshile Gorky.
One of Rosenberg's most often cited essays is "The Herd of Independent Minds," where he analyzes the trivialization of personal experience inherent both in mass culture-making and superficial political commitment in the arts.
He wrote mockingly of mass culture's efforts to consolidate and control the intricacies of human needs: The more exactly he grasps, whether by instinct or through study, the existing element of sameness in people, the more successful is the mass-culture maker.
Indeed, so deeply is he committed to the concept that men are alike that he may even fancy that there exists a kind of human dead center in which everyone is identical with everyone else, and that if he can hit that psychic bull's eye he can make all mankind twitch at once.
His essay, "The American Action Painters," brought into focus the paramount concern of de Kooning, Pollock, and Kline in particular, with the act of painting.
Rosenberg saw the artist's task as a heroic exploration of the most profound issues of personal identity and experience in relation to the large questions of the human condition.
This led to the Elegies to the Spanish Republic, a series of artworks which Motherwell continued to produce for the rest of his life, using the same visual motif of rough ovoid and rectangular forms.
[14] Along with Clement Greenberg and Leo Steinberg, he was identified in Tom Wolfe's 1975 book The Painted Word as one of the three figures of "Cultureburg", so named for the enormous degree of influence their criticism exerted over the world of modern art.
[15] In 1987, Alan M. Wald quotes Rosenberg's 1965 "Death in the Wilderness" at the opening of his introductory chapter entitled "Political Amnesia" in his book The New York Intellectuals.