Rosenthal revealed: a nude portrait of the
Royal Academy's exhibitions secretary goes on show
by Martin Bailey

LONDON. Royal Academy (RA) exhibitions secretary Norman Rosenthal’s secret past as a model is revealed in a painting which was unveiled on Friday. Beachy Head, Break of Day, by Jeffery Camp, shows Mr Rosenthal as an athletic, nude forty-year-old, floating above the cliffs. “It’s a picture which is full of the delights of eroticism,” Camp told The Art Newspaper.

Mr Rosenthal, who has now worked at the RA for thirty years, posed on a series of occasions in Camp’s Clapham studio in 1985. Yesterday he said that this was the only time he had modelled in the nude. “I turned down Andy Warhol,” he admitted.

Camp had been elected an Academician the year before the sessions. “Norman was young then, and I did a series of drawings,” the artist explained. From these, he made a large painting which was inspired by seeing hang gliders soaring above Beachy Head. Camp describes the scene as “like a daydream, with an ecstatic figure above the lighthouse.”

For 22 years, the picture has remained hidden away in the artist’s studio, before it went on show at Islington’s Art Space Gallery, in London, in an exhibition which opened on 11 May to mark Camp’s 84th birthday. Priced at £10,000, it sold quickly at the private view, to Anthony Green, a fellow Academician. “It’s as significant as Stanley Spencer’s Leg of Mutton at the Tate,” Green explained.

Mr Rosenthal remains a great admirer of Camp’s work, particularly for the way that he depicts bodies, whether male or female, bringing “an inherent erotic charge that is always totally electric in the most beautiful sense.” He adds that Camp is “something of a voyeur and through his art he makes us that also.”

Mr Rosenthal has proved a highly successful, although controversial RA exhibitions secretary, and he is renowned for his strong views and knowledge of the art world. In the past he has had his ups and downs with a series of Academy administrators, and he will be getting a new boss in September, with the arrival of Dr Charles Saumarez Smith, who resigned a month ago as director of the National Gallery.