Jack Roth (1927-2004)

Born in Brockway, Pennsylvania, Jack Roth was at various times a painter, poet, photographer, and mathematician. He enrolled at Pennsylvania State University in 1943 to study chemistry, but like many of his fellow Abstract Expressionists, his matriculation was interrupted World War II, where he served in both the Army and Air Force.

Discharged from the service in 1948, Roth moved to Big Sur, California and married his first wife, Colleen Bleier, with whom he had two daughters. A year later, the young family settled in San Francisco, where Jack enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts. It was here that he studied painting under Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, and Elmer Bischoff.

The Roth family left the Bay Area to return to Pennsylvania, where Jack completed his Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry in 1951. In pursuit of his seemingly discordant academic interests, Roth moved yet again, this time to Iowa where he received a Master of Fine Arts at Iowa State University in 1953. Seeking gainful employment, Roth moved to New York, settling in the lower East Side where he began looking for a teaching job and working as a reviewer for Arts Digest magazine.

Now divorced, in 1954 Roth married the artist Rachel Chester whom he had met in Iowa. He continued to paint and work odd jobs, some of which were as a hotel night clerk and an orderly at Beekman Downtown Hospital. That year, he unsuccessfully applied for the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in the field of photography.

However, Roth’s professional prospects greatly improved when his work was selected by James Johnson Sweeney, Director of the Guggenheim Museum of Art for the traveling exhibition Younger American Painters, alongside giants such as William Baziotes, Richard Diebenkorn, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Morris Louis, and others. One of the first major debuts of the Abstract Expressionist movement to be shown at an American museum, the exhibit traveled to the prominent museums across the country. In 1956 he began graduate work in mathematics at New York University.

Opting to dive back into academia, Roth began graduate coursework in mathematics at New York University in 1956. He enrolled at Duke University in 1958,  receiving his PhD in mathematics in 1962.

Roth continued to create art throughout the pendency of his graduate studies and in 1963, legendary Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) curators Dorothy Miller and William Lieberman recommended Roth as the new talent graphic artist for Art in America. Concurrently, MoMA purchased several works from Roth for the museum’s permanent collection.

During this period of artistic achievement, Roth continued to teach - first, at the University of South Florida in Tampa, before moving back north to Montclair, New Jersey, where he was hired as the chairman of the Mathematics department at Upsala College. In 1971 he accepted a dual appointment at Ramapo College, teaching both mathematics and advanced painting. After he received tenure and his finances were secure, his artistic production thrived as he received the first Thomases Award for contributions at the school, which came with the use of a large studio space. This allowed him to work with larger canvases and become what he saw as an Abstract Expressionist Color Field painter.

In 1978, the acclaimed gallery Knoedler & Co. in New York began representation of Roth’s work. Other artists represented by the gallery at this time included Alexander Calder, Adolf Gottlieb, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Frank Stella, Friedel Dzubas, Jules Olitski, Nancy Graves, and Michael Goldberg. In 1979, he was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in painting.

Roth’s work has been collected extensively, and can be found in major public and private collections around the world.

Source: Vallarino Fine Art