Joe Rosenthal

Joe Rosenthal (1921 – July 1, 2018) was a Canadian illustrator, painter and sculptor. He was a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and the Ontario Society of Artists.

History Rosenthal was born in 1921 in Romania (now Moldova). He emigrated along with his family to Canada in 1927 at the age of six. By 1935, he was enrolled in the arts program of Toronto’s Central Technical School. In 1943, Rosenthal placed first in an army art exhibition. After his military service, Rosenthal continued his studies at the Ontario College of Art, where he studied printmaking, drawing, painting and sculpture

In 1969, the Canada Council awarded Rosenthal a grant to go on a three-month tour across Canada where he would go on to produce over 600 drawings of First Nation communities. and was awarded The Rabin International Presentation Sculpture at Los Angeles in 1996. He latterly lived in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and died in July 2018 at the age of 97 at the Sunnybrook Veterans Centre.

Family Rosenthal was the brother-in-law of Ross Dowson and was a member of the Revolutionary Workers' Party until the early 1950s when he was part of a split concerning the group's orientation towards the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. His wife, Joyce Rosenthal (1919-2015), Ross Dowson's sister, was a long-time socialist and an activist in the women's movement, particularly around abortion rights. She co-founded the Ontario chapter of the Canadian Hemophilia Society after discovering that their son, Ron (1950-1982), was a hemophiliac. Their daughter, Susan Rosenthal (born 1949), is a retired physician, psychotherapist, and writer. In 2014, she sued her father over being forced to model for him in the nude when she was a child and adolescent. He was found liable for battery and breach of fiduciary duty and Susan Rosenthal was awarded non-pecuniary damages totalling of $180,000 and pecuniary damages totalling $495,000.

Works