Rosenthal's first exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1978, at the suggestion of Bryan Robertson, was on the American painter Robert Motherwell. It was followed by a major exhibition on Post-Impressionism in 1979–80, and in 1981 A New Spirit in Painting, an exhibition of neo-Expressionist painting co-curated with and Sir Nicholas Serota. Considered to be one of Rosenthal's greatest achievements, this exhibition foregrounded the work of painters Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer, and set the agenda for a "return to painting" in the early 1980s. In 1997, Rosenthal co-curated the very controversial exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection with Charles Saatchi. Besides these two most notorious exhibitions, for with which Rosenthal is most readily identified, he organised over thirty exhibitions ranging from "Art in Plantagenet England 1200–1400" in 1987 to Anish Kapoor in 2009 (for a full list see below). The majority of these exhibitions were initiatives of the Royal Academy that travelled to museums in the United States and Europe. While still at the Royal Academy Rosenthal curated a number of exhibitions in Germany, including "Zeitgeist" at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin with Christos M. Joachimides in 1982, Metropolis, again at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, in 1991, and Nationalschätze aus Deutschland: Von Luther zum Bauhaus at the Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn in 2005-6.