Barbara Rose

Barbara Ellen Rose (June 11, 1936 – December 25, 2020) was an American art historian, art critic, curator, and college professor. Rose's criticism focused on 20th-century American art, particularly minimalism and abstract expressionism, as well as Spanish art. "ABC Art", her influential 1965 essay, defined and outlined the historical basis of minimalist art. She also wrote a widely used textbook, American Art Since 1900: A Critical History.

Early life and education Barbara Ellen Rose was born on June 11, 1936, in a Jewish family in Washington, D.C. to Lillian Rose (née Sand) and Ben Rose. Her father owned a liquor store, and her mother was a homemaker. She graduated from Calvin Coolidge High School in the Takoma neighborhood of Washington D.C.

At the age of 17, Rose enrolled at Smith College, but after two years transferred to Barnard College, where she received a B.A. in 1957. She completed her graduate studies at Columbia University, The university accepted "various books by Rose, published between 1970–1983" as her dissertation. The cinematographer Michael Chapman introduced Rose to many New York artists, including Carl Andre and Frank Stella (to whom she was married 1961–69), She later noted that formalist art historian Michael Fried suggested she begin writing as a critic. Harrison notes that Rose's 1963 publication describing pop art as "neo-Dada" was her "entry into the field of contemporary American art criticism". Rose soon argued that formalist criticism was inadequate to then-contemporary art. She observed in a 1966 article that formalism, while appropriate for analysis of Cubism, was not as useful as a critical lens on abstract expressionism and other movements of the later 20th century. She wrote the textbook American Art Since 1900: A Critical History (1967), which became standard in campuses in the 1970s. She later worked as an instructor at a New York City correctional facility. She served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Art (from 1988). many of these were also about women, including Helen Frankenthaler (1971), and she also wrote on Nancy Graves, Beverly Pepper and Niki de Saint Phalle.

Rose taught art history at Sarah Lawrence College (from 1967) and was a visiting lecturer at Yale University (from 1970) and Hunter College (1987); she also taught at University of California, Irvine and University of California, San Diego, where she was Regent's Professor.

"ABC Art" Kazimir Malevich, Black Square (1915). In "ABC Art", Rose described Malevich as one of minimalism's progenitors. In October 1965, Rose published the essay "ABC Art" in Art in America, in which she describes the fundamental characteristics of what was later known as minimal art. ("ABC art" was one of Rose's suggested names for the movement; she also suggested "reductive art" and "object sculpture".) "ABC Art" considers the diverse roots of minimalism in the work of Kasimir Malevich and Marcel Duchamp, as well as the choreography of Merce Cunningham, the art criticism of Clement Greenberg, the philosophy of Wittgenstein, and the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet. She regarded Ad Reinhardt as a progenitor of minimalism, and not a minimalist proper. In examining the historical roots of minimal art in 1960s America, Rose drew a distinction between Malevich's "search for the transcendental, universal, absolute" and Duchamp's "blanket denial of the existence of absolute values". Rose further argued in "ABC Art" that minimalist sculpture was at its best when it was inhospitable to its audience: "difficult, hostile, awkward and oversize".

Rose grouped some 1960s artists as closer to Malevich, some as closer to Duchamp, and some as between the two; she argued that the work of some minimalists constituted a "synthesis" of Malevich and Duchamp. Closer to Malevich were Walter Darby Bannard, Larry Zox, Robert Huot, Lyman Kipp, Richard Tuttle, Jan Evans, Ronald Bladen, Anne Truitt. Closer to Duchamp were Richard Artschwager and Andy Warhol. Between Malevich and Duchamp she placed Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Dan Flavin. Her conclusion was that minimal art is both transcendental and negative: The art I have been talking about is obviously a negative art of denial and renunciation. Such protracted asceticism is normally the activity of contemplatives or mystics...Like the mystic, in their work these artists deny the ego and the individual personality, seeking to evoke, it would seem, the semihypnotic state of blank unconsciousness.

She also contrasted minimal art with Pop Art: ...if Pop Art is the reflection of our environment, perhaps the art I have been describing is its antidote, even if it is a hard one to swallow.

Personal life Rose was married four times to three men. In 1959, she married Richard Du Boff, an economic historian; She was 84.

Honors and awards 1967 and 1970: College Art Association, Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinguished Art Criticism 1972: New York, Front Page Award for best column "Artists with Convictions"

Books edited

Articles

Curated exhibitions 1969: Claes Oldenburg, Museum of Modern Art (New York City) 1979: Abstract Painting: The Eighties, Grey Art Gallery, New York University (New York City) 1982: Joan Miró, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Houston, Texas) 1982–1983: Fernand Léger, Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris (Paris); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Houston, Texas); Musée Rath (Geneva) 1983: Lee Krasner, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Houston, Texas); Museum of Modern Art (New York City) 1992: Abstract Painting: The '90s, André Emmerich Gallery (New York City)

Filmography 1972: American Art in the 1960s, narrator 1972: The New York School, narrator 1977: North Star: Mark di Suvero, writer