Rosenthal celebrates 30th anniversary at the RA

Norman Rosenthal, the exhibitions secretary of the Royal Academy, has revealed his desire to hold a Damien Hirst retrospective as a tribute to the artist.

Mr Rosenthal, who is celebrating his 30th anniversary at the RA this week, hailed Hirst as one of the country's most important living creative figures yesterday. "I would love to put on a Damien Hirst show," Mr Rosenthal said. "He is an incredible artist and a crucial figure from his generation, there's no doubt about that."

Mr Rosenthal, who worked closely with Hirst on the Sensation exhibition of 1997, said the artist was among those contributing to a particularly exciting era in British art. "I think history will look back over the past 10 to 20 years as the golden pop age," he said in an exclusive interview with The Independent.

His desire to stage an exhibition devoted to the often controversial Hirst will come as no surprise to many, who see the veteran exhibitions secretary as a pioneering figure who has defended the artist's right to address sensitive subjects in their work, insisting: "It has always been the role of artists to conquer territory that has been taboo."

Some of the art world's greatest figures gathered in London last night for a celebration which was nominally for the opening of a retrospective of the German painter Georg Basilitz but was in fact a party to celebrate Mr Rosenthal's 30 years at the RA.

He is known for his determination to bring contemporary, subversive artists to the academy, having transformed the institution's fortunes. Mr Rosenthal is also credited for having made visual art more accessible. When he arrived at the RA in 1977, it was known as an elitist institution. Today, it is one of the world's great exhibition spaces.

He is equally well known for his public showdowns. His bloodstain from a fight is said to still mark the walls of the ICA, and he once spat at an art critic before expelling him from an exhibition.

Glittering career

Norman Rosenthal was born in Cambridge in 1944 to Jewish refugees. In 1977, he wrote an article about how the Royal Academy should reform itself, prompting Sir Hugh Casson, to hire him.

In 1981, the RA met the night before the opening of A New Spirit in Painting to vote on whether it was too "corrupting", and, in 1997, the Sensation exhibition led some academicians to resign. In 2001, Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art, showed an interpretation of the story of St John the Divine with images of genocide.

In 1989, Rosenthal married Manuela Beatriz Mena Marques, a curator of 18th-century paintings at the Prado.