Her exhibitions, at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan and elsewhere, showed that drawings were far more than preliminary works executed on paper.
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.”
Besides showcasing drawings by popular figures like David Hockney, Ellsworth Kelly, Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein, Ms. Rose included many surprises, among them a page of musical notations from the composer John Cage’s 1958 work “Concert for Piano and Orchestra.”
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.
