Seeking employment, he walked into Agnew & Sons Ltd, art dealers and print publishers on Bond Street, and enquired whether any positions were available.
[4] 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.
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.
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 critic Christos M. Joachimides and German artist Joseph Beuys.
[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.
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.
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".
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.
"[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 elderly Victor Pasmore.
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.
"[12] Since his resignation from the Royal Academy Rosenthal has continued to curate exhibitions and write on established and emerging contemporary artists.
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.
[13][14] Founded in October 2020 by British-Irish artist Josef O'Connor, they commission and stream a monthly programme of art and culture, every evening at 20:21, across a global network of billboards in London, Tokyo and Seoul.
[15] In 1989, Rosenthal married Manuela Mena Marques, former Deputy Director of the Prado, Madrid, and former Senior Curator of Eighteenth-Century Painting and Goya.
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 at Baroness Thyssen Bornemisza's sale of Constable's The Lock[citation needed]); Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2004–06; and currently English National Ballet, 2012 – ongoing.
He was interviewed by the filmmaker John Maybury in Love is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon, and played a donkey-riding Ludwig Wittgenstein in Otto Muehl's Back to Fucking Cambridge.