Barbara Ellen Rose was born on June 11, 1936, in Washington, the eldest daughter of Lillian and Ben Rose. His mother was a housewife and his father, who owned a liquor store, had a cut glass bar for the family’s recreation room. At the age of 3, Bárbara felt aesthetically offended by her “tasteless, tasteless or vulgar environment”, she wrote in a memoir that was about to be released, and decided to flee as soon as she could.
She graduated from Barnard and did graduate work at Columbia, writing her thesis on 16th century Spanish painting and visiting Pamplona with a Fulbright scholarship. It was the beginning of a lasting fascination with Madrid, where he ended up buying a house. In 2010, she was awarded the Order of Isabel by the Spanish government for her contributions to Spanish culture.
Mrs. Rose was still a student when she started dating Mr. Stella, an early Princeton alumnus whose austere black-streaked paintings were pushing art away from the Expressionist past. In the fall of 1961, he followed her to Pamplona, making sketches in her hotel room while she visited ancient churches to research Navarra’s painting.
They were married in October at the London registry. Michael Fried, the formalist art historian, served as a witness and gave them a volume of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writings as a gift.
Mrs. Rose later said that she started writing reviews with Fried’s encouragement. Her landmark essay “ABC Art”, published in Art in America in October 1965, identified a generation of young artists whose work, she wrote, emitted an “empty, neutral and mechanical impersonality”. They included Mr. Stella, as well as Carl Andre, Robert Morris and Donald Judd. Linking her work with European predecessors like Kazimir Malevich and, less predictably, Marcel Duchamp, she provided a high historical line for the avant-garde art of the 1960s.
Her marriage to Mr. Stella ended in 1969, and the two also divorced their initial adoption of minimalism. “The only thing anyone knows about me is that I wrote that article with the title I didn’t give,” lamented Rose in Artforum magazine in 2016, referring to “ABC Art”. She blamed her editor for the headline.