by Keith Allen and his anti-establishment friends. To this day flecks of blood remain preserved beneath plexiglass on the ICA office wall. Beneath it, a title reads: "This is Norman’s Blood." Royal Academy, London In 1977, The Spectator published a short polemical article Rosenthal wrote called "The Future of the RA". In it he criticised the organisation for its lack of driving philosophy. It had fantastic galleries, but lacked money and vision. Partly as a result of this article Rosenthal was eventually offered a job as Exhibitions Secretary by then President Hugh Casson. Rosenthal's first exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1978, at the suggestion of Bryan Robertson, was on the American painter Robert Motherwell. It was followed by a major exhibition on Post-Impressionism in 1979–80, and in 1981 A New Spirit in Painting, an exhibition of neo-Expressionist painting co-curated with Christos M Joachimides and Sir Nicholas Serota. 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. In 1997, Rosenthal co-curated the very controversial exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection with Charles Saatchi. Besides these two most notorious exhibitions, for with which Rosenthal is most readily identified, he organised over thirty exhibitions ranging from Art in Plantagenet England 1200–1400 in 1987 to Anish Kapoor in 2009 (for a full list see below). The majority of these exhibitions were initiatives of the Royal Academy that travelled to museums in the United States and Europe. While still at the Royal Academy Rosenthal curated a number of exhibitions in Germany, including Zeitgeist at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin with Christos M. Joachimides in 1982, Metropolis, again at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, in 1991, and Nationalschätze aus Deutschland: Von Luther zum Bauhaus at the Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn in 2005-6. Rosenthal was notoriously unpopular with Royal Academicians. Many felt their work had been ignored by the Exhibitions Secretary, and was only displayed in the annual Summer Exhibition with which Rosenthal played no part." I want the best exhibitions. That's that," Rosenthal told Fiona Maddocks in an article for the Evening Standard in 1998. "OK. Strictly speaking all the Academicians are equal," he continued, "But it's an open secret that some are more equal than others: Tracey Emin, Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, David Hockney, Gary Hume, Anish Kapoor, Tom Phillips, Richard Rogers, the