Barbara Ellen Rose (June 11, 1936 – December 25, 2020) was an American art historian, art critic, curator, and college professor. Rose's criticism focused on 20th-century American art, particularly minimalism and abstract expressionism, as well as Spanish art. "ABC Art", her influential 1965 essay, defined and outlined the historical basis of minimalist art. She also wrote a widely used textbook, American Art Since 1900: A Critical History.

Barbara Ellen Rose was born on June 11, 1936, in a Jewish family in Washington, D.C. to Lillian Rose (née Sand) and Ben Rose. Her father owned a liquor store, and her mother was a homemaker. She graduated from Calvin Coolidge High School in the Takoma neighborhood of Washington D.C.

At the age of 17, Rose enrolled at Smith College, but after two years transferred to Barnard College, where she received a B.A. in 1957. She completed her graduate studies at Columbia University, studying with Meyer Schapiro, Julius S. Held, and Rudolf Wittkower, and started work on a PhD, but did not complete it. She was eventually awarded a PhD in history of art by Columbia in 1984. The university accepted "various books by Rose, published between 1970–1983" as her dissertation.

In 1961, she received a Fulbright scholarship to visit Pamplona, Spain, which sparked a lasting interest in Spanish culture and art. The cinematographer Michael Chapman introduced Rose to many New York artists, including Carl Andre and Frank Stella (to whom she was married 1961–69), which gave her an insight into the New York art scene during the 1960s and 1970s.

Rose's first work of criticism was published in 1962. She later noted that formalist art historian Michael Fried suggested she begin writing as a critic. Rose is credited with popularizing the term Neo-Dada in the early 1960s; Harrison notes that Rose's 1963 publication describing pop art as "neo-Dada" was her "entry into the field of contemporary American art criticism". Rose soon argued that formalist criticism was inadequate to then-contemporary art. She observed in a 1966 article that formalism, while appropriate for analysis of Cubism, was not as useful as a critical lens on abstract expressionism and other movements of the later 20th century. She wrote the textbook American Art Since 1900: A Critical History (1967), which became standard in campuses in the 1970s. From 1971 until 1977, she was an art critic for the New York magazine. In 1972, she received a Front Page Award for her article "Artists with Convictions", which described the art program for inmates of the Manhattan House of Detention for Men. She later worked as an instructor at a New York City correctional facility. She served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Art (from 1988).

From 1981 until 1985, Rose was a senior curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where she curated shows including Miró in America and Fernand Léger and the Modern Spirit: An Avant-Garde Alternative to Non-Objective Art, both in 1982. In 1983, she curated the first Lee Krasner retrospective, which exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Rose frequently wrote on Krasner's work, describing her as "one of the seminal forces among the Abstract Expressionists"; in a 1977 article entitled "Lee Krasner and the Origins of Abstract Expressionism", she argued that Krasner had been unjustly overlooked by critics. Rose's books include over twenty monographs about artists; many of these were also about women, including Helen Frankenthaler (1971), and she also wrote on Nancy Graves, Beverly Pepper and Niki de Saint Phalle.

Rose taught art history at Sarah Lawrence College (from 1967) and was a visiting lecturer at Yale University (from 1970) and Hunter College (1987); she also taught at University of California, Irvine and University of California, San Diego, where she was Regent's Professor.

She wrote North Star: Mark di Suvero (1977), a documentary film about the sculptor Mark di Suvero.