North of Madrid - 4, 1981
Acrylic on canvas
54 x 54 inches
Signed verso
Cover, back cover: Phant - 6, 1980
Acrylic on canvas
18 x 38 inches
Signed and dated ‘80 lower right,
Signed, titled, and dated ‘80 verso
Untitled, 1968
Acrylic on canvas
62 1/2 x 56 1/2 inches
“His chosen idiom is the soft-shelled abstractionism that in other hands has begun to look played out...Roth has something of his own to add. He is a master of the animated edge. Where the central area of the canvas is at peace with itself, the perimeter is full of chromatic incidents of a cheeky, unsubdued kind. These paintings are almost dangerously easy to like, but they have teeth…”
John Russell, The New York Times, 1980
Jack Roth considered himself a color field painter. His paintings are recognizable for thin contour lines or sharp edges, and soft forms, in addition to an expressive use of color. Poet, photographer, mathematician, university professor, and abstract expressionist painter, Roth relentlessly pursued art and science. Rachel Chester, his wife, described him as a genius, and the hardest working person she had ever known. Roth was represented by the renowned New York gallery, Knoedler & Co., where he was given his first one-man New York exhibition in 1980.
Born in Brockway, Pennsylvania in 1927, Jack Roth earned a scholarship to Pennsylvania State University in 1943 where he studied chemistry, but his tenure there was interrupted by his service in World War II. Roth moved to San Francisco in 1949 and enrolled in the California School of Fine Arts where he studied under Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Richard Diebenkorn. He re-enrolled at Penn State in 1951 and earned his Bachelor’s in chemistry, an achievement later followed by a Master of Fine Arts from the State University of Iowa in 1952, and a PhD in mathematics from Duke University in 1962.
In 1954, shortly after he relocated to New York, Roth’s paintings were included in the Guggenheim Museum’s exhibition “Younger American Painters” alongside many of the leading artists of the Abstract Expressionist group, including Pollock, de Kooning, and Motherwell. The exhibition traveled to major art museums throughout the US, serving as the nation’s primary introduction to this new American- born movement. In 1978, Knoedler & Co. in New York began their representation of Roth’s work, placing him in a prestigious stable of artists that included Alexander Calder, Frank Stella, and Franz Kline. Roth was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for painting the following year and continued on with his academic career, teaching mathematics at colleges in Kentucky, Florida and New Jersey.
Of his unique career, Roth said, “I am looking for a mathematical explanation of art… the art of painting is a search for reality; a search for understanding.” He died in 2004, just shy of his 78th birthday.
Opposite page: Dialogue, 1979
Acrylic on canvas
66 x 20 inches
Signed and dated lower left
Above: Untitled, 1995
Acrylic on paper
22 1/2 x 30 1/2 inches
Signed and dated lower right
Below:
Dance to the Music of Spring, Montclair #31, 1981
Acrylic on canvas
24 x 90 inches
Signed, titled and dated ‘81 verso
Opposite page:: Untitled, 1967
Acrylic on canvas
55 x 54 1/2 inches
Signed and dated verso
