Rose, Barbara

Biographical/Historical Note

Barbara Rose is an American art historian and critic, born in 1938 and educated at Smith College, Barnard College and Columbia University. She is known primarily for her writings on 20th-century American art. She has taught (at Hunter College, the Universtiy of California at San Diego and Irvine, and Sarah Lawrence College), curated exhibitions and made films.

Through her marriage to Frank Stella and friendships with many other New York artists, she was a well-positioned observer of the American art world, particularly in the active New York scene of the 1960s and 1970s. Her first book, American Art Since 1900, published 1967, was followed by more than twenty monographs on artists, many more exhibition catalogue essays and hundreds of pieces of art journalism.

From the guide to the Barbara Rose papers, 1940-1993, 1960-1985, (Getty Research Institute)