Bernice Rose, an art historian and curator whose groundbreaking exhibitions put traditional drawing on an equal footing with painting and sculpture, challenging notions of it as their poor cousin, died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 87.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Roberta Alpert, a family friend.
As a drawing curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Ms. Rose organized exhibitions that showed how drawings were far more than preliminary works executed mainly on paper. In a catalog that accompanied “Drawing Now: 1955-1975,” her 1976 landmark exhibition at MoMA, she wrote that drawing had become “a major and independent medium with distinctive expressive possibilities altogether its own.”
When the show opened, John Russell, then the chief art critic for The New York Times, called it “one of the best and most useful exhibitions ever mounted at the Museum of Modern Art.”
There were zany works on view, too, by artists who were not known for drawing, like Bruce Nauman’s “My Last Name Extended Vertically 24 Times,” a nearly 7-foot-high study for one of his neon sculptures, along with a drawing executed on a wall by Sol LeWitt and one fashioned from pencil and wire by Richard Tuttle.
There was also a 6-by-8-foot work of etched glass created by the land artist Michael Heizer.
“I sent it to the museum in a standard commercial crate, which was built for maximum protection,” Mr. Heizer said by phone. “When it arrived at MoMA, the art handlers took it outside and laid it on the ground in a courtyard, where it broke.”
Undeterred, Ms. Rose ordered a replacement glass; Mr. Heizer then flew from his home in the Nevada desert to New York and proceeded to make another one, which, he said, actually turned out better. “Bernice had it installed in a wall, which was very impressive,” he said. “She was totally unflappable.”
Bernice Harriet Berend was born on Oct. 7, 1935, in Miami Beach to Rose and Bert Berend. Her father sold electrical equipment. When she was about 6, her parents moved the family to Brooklyn, where Bernice grew up.
She received her bachelor’s in fine arts from Hunter College, where she studied painting with the artist Robert Motherwell, and earned a master’s degree in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. In 1956, she married Herbert Rose, a lawyer who was the legal adviser to many prominent Jewish organizations. He died in 2010.
Ms. Rose left no immediate survivors.
A feisty woman who could stand in front of a drawing and discuss its merits in granular detail, Ms. Rose began her 28-year career at MoMA as a secretary in the department of painting and sculpture and worked her way up to senior curator in the department of drawings. She organized many exhibitions, like “A Cezanne Treasure: The Basel Sketchbooks,” “Surrealism” and “Jackson Pollock: Drawing into Painting.”
She was the author of several publications, including “Allegories of Modernism: Contemporary Drawing” (1992), and spearheaded a number of critical acquisitions for the museum.
“Among the many exceptional drawings acquired by Bernice are not only an extraordinary work on paper by Yves Klein executed with an open flame rather than a paint brush, but also MoMA’s first major wall drawing by Sol LeWitt,” Christophe Cherix, the museum’s chief curator of drawings and prints, said in an email. Ms. Rose, he added, “shaped to a large extent our current understanding of the medium.”
“She recognized early that for a generation of artists who emerged in the 1960s, the art of drawing knew no boundaries,” Mr. Cherix said.
Ms. Rose left MoMA in 1993 to become director of special exhibitions at Pace Gallery in New York, where among the shows she organized were the drawings of Henry Moore from the 1930s and ’40s and “Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubism.”
By 2007, the Menil Collection in Houston had appointed her the inaugural chief curator at its drawing institute. In 2018, the institute opened to the public a new 30,000-square-foot building on the Menil’s 30-acre campus dedicated to the conservation and study of modern and contemporary drawing.
While there she organized several monographic shows focusing on drawings by artists like Tony Smith, Claes Oldenburg and Cy Twombly. Although Ms. Rose retired from the Menil in 2014, she never stopped working. She was the chief editor emerita of the “Jasper Johns Catalogue Raisonné of Drawing,” published in 2018, as well as an adviser to the Houston collector Louisa Stude Sarofim.
“Bernice showed generations of curators and collectors that drawing is a discipline, a way of thinking and an activity or practice unlimited by convention or materials,” Rebecca Rabinow, director of the Menil Collection, said in an email. “Her redefinition of what a drawing is continues to shape intellectual thought around the world.”
