JACK
ROTH FORMULAS IN COLOR
When Jack Roth was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for painting in 1979, a headline in The New York Times read “A Math Professor Wins Art Fellowship”. Roth was a professor of mathematics at Ramapo College in Mahwah, NJ, where he also taught advanced painting. He said at the time, “I think there is a definite connection between doing work in mathematics and work in painting. They're very similar creative activities. Both creative mathematicians and artists are out there at the edges of horizons trying to push back the frontiers of human knowledge and understanding.”
Roth (1927 - 2004) grew up on his grandparents’ farm in Punxsutawney, PA, and attended Pennsylvania State University where he majored in chemistry but left to serve in the Army and the Air Force during WWII. His life as a peripatetic polymath, gathering knowledge and skill in what might seem to be disparate disciplines, began after his service in 1949 when he enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. There, he studied with Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Richard Diebenkorn. He returned to Pennsylvania to complete his undergraduate degree in art and chemistry and, in 1953, received his MFA at the State University of Iowa where his thesis was on Zen Buddhism and the New York School. Later, in 1962, he received his PhD in mathematics at Duke University.
In 1954 he was living in New York and worked odd jobs from that of a hotel night clerk to an orderly at a New York hospital to support his family--while he continued to paint. That year, however, he was chosen by James Johnson Sweeney, director of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum to be in the traveling exhibition, Younger American Painters, which introduced contemporary painters and was one of the first to feature the work of the abstract expressionists. Among the artists were William Baziotes, Diebenkorn, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock. Sweeney wrote in his catalogue essay, “The term ‘younger’…refers to the youth of the artists’ reputations rather than to the age of the artists.” At 27, however, Roth was often more than a decade younger than his fellow artists.
In 1963 he showed his work to Dorothy Miller and Alexander Lieberman, curators at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The museum purchased his 4 by 5 foot chalk on paper drawing, Where are they now? It commemorated a number of luminaries in the arts who had recently died. Among them are Marilyn Monroe, Franz Kline, Ernest Hemingway, Izaak Dinesen and William Faulkner whose names appear in print and script and whose likenesses fade into the softness of the chalk.
That same year, Lieberman recommended that Art in America name Roth their new talent artist of the year. Lieberman also curated the exhibition 60 Modern Drawings: New Acquisitions featuring work dated from 1886 to 1963. It included 45 artists from 9 countries, including Roth’s large drawing and works by Auguste Rodin, Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee.
He left Florida and moved back north to New Jersey where, in 1971, he began teaching at the newly opened Ramapo College where he attained tenure and was given studio space in which he could work on large canvases.
In 1978, Knoedler & Co, the prestigious New York gallery, began representing his work. At the time, the gallery represented Diebenkorn, Alexander Calder, Gottlieb, Kline, Motherwell, Frank Stella, David Smith, Nancy Graves and Friedel Dzubas
The following year, he received his Guggenheim Fellowship of $14,000 and was given sabbatical leave from the college. In his report to the college at the end of his year-long leave he wrote, “During the period in question I completed nearly 250 paintings, acrylic on cotton or linen canvas. These range in size from 78 x 100 inches to 3 x 10 inches and include about 30 polyptychs. In addition I completed about 100 paintings in acrylic on paper, about 100 collages, and 400 or so drawings… I thank the Guggenheim Foundation for making this year possible.”
In 1980, he had his first solo exhibition at Knoedler & Co. The noted critic for The New York Times, John Russell, wrote:
Jack Roth is a painter in his early 50s. This is his first one-man exhibition in New York, but it is immediately clear that he has behind him a long history of hard work. His chosen idiom is the soft-shelled abstractionism that in other hands has begun to look played out. Color is predominantly matte and muted, drawing (where present at all) looks as if it might have been done on the walls of a cave, forms are large and sprawl. But Mr. Roth has something of his own to add. He is a master, for instance, of the animated edge. Where the entire central area of his canvas is at peace with itself, as it usually is, the perimeter is full of chromatic incidents of a cheeky, unsubdued kind. Where we are all set to relax with what look like so many transplanted cloud structures, Mr. Roth comes up with a set of geometrical sharp edges that warn us not to take him for granted. These paintings are almost dangerously easy to like, but they have teeth, and those teeth are kept in good order.
In his essay for the catalogue of the 2011 exhibition Color Line Equations at Spanierman Modern in New York, Thomas McCormick wrote, “In an unpublished 1981 essay titled ‘Towards a Mathematical Theory of Art,’ which exists in a jumble of edited rewrites, Roth sought to outline the mathematical mechanism by which art searches for reality. While his precise theory is elusive, with topics such as mathematical algorithms, the Big Bang Theory, and Einstein, a few quotes serve to illustrate the spirit in which he tried to relate art and math:
‘Since the beginnings of Abstract Expressionism the major problem has been that of subject matter. This is my concern also…. ‘The title of this paper is ‘Towards a Mathematical Theory of Art.’ I am not concerned with mathematical methods for making or evaluating art…I am looking for a mathematical explanation of such art, an explanation which I hope will clarify the ‘subject of the artist.’ The subject of art is reality and the act of painting is a search for reality; a search for understanding. In the words of the American painter Hans Hofmann, a Search for the Real. I subscribe to this view. In this paper I outline the mathematical mechanism by which this search proceeds.’”
Before his death in 2004, Roth struggled with poor health for several years, during which he stored much of his work in an onion barn in Chester, New York. The paintings in the current LewAllen exhibition come from the treasures stored in the onion barn and are, indeed, as fresh and vital as when they were painted.
Among them is Metafour II, 1980-84, which bears a Knoedler & Co. label on the verso. The forms of its broad expanses of color are separated by thin unpainted contour lines and are superimposed by amorphous forms that bleed their own color into them. Commenting on line that is prominent in a positive graphic way, Roth wrote, “I used to fantasize about a line that was so beautiful that it would mean everything, would express all, and would be the locus of all our hopes and aspirations, joys and sorrows, and where we could find peace and oneness. In recent years I have come to believe that such a line… can only be approximated.”
Three other paintings from 1980, in the Rope Dancer series, in the current exhibition, are painted with more vibrant color. The colorful forms, their arrangement and juxtapositions recall torn paper collages and the cutouts of Henri Matisse. In his paintings, Roth brought together the extraordinary breadth of his interests and knowledge. They invite the viewer to consider their color and its application, the relationships of their forms and lines and the rhythms that he explored in his poetry. They invite the viewer to contemplate in silence as Roth did in his practice of Zen.
- John O’Hern
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2021 Works from the Estate, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
2012 Jack Roth, 1927—2004: Color Equations, Peyton Wright Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
Jack is Back, (Vallarino & McCormick) McCormick Gallery, Chicago, IL
2011 Line Color Equation, Spanierman Modern, New York, NY
When I Grow Up I Want to Be Just Like Jasper Johns, Jack Roth: Drawings from the 1960s, (Vallarino & McCormick) McCormick Gallery, Chicago, IL
1997 Collonades Gallery, Montclair, NJ
1986 Jack Roth Ramapo College Art Gallery, Mahwah, NJ
Jack Roth—Recent Work, Ochi Gallery, Boise, ID
1985 Jack Roth Paintings, Princeton Gallery of Art, Princeton, NJ
Jack Roth, Wyckoff Gallery, Wyckoff, NJ
1983 Jack Roth Paintings, Knoedler & Co., New York, NY
Jack Roth, Acrylics on Paper, Ochi Gallery, Boise, ID
Jack Roth, Milhouse-Bundy Museum, Waitsfield, VT
Jack Roth, Acrylics on Paper, New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ
1982-83 Jack Roth: Drawings and Watercolors, Ramapo College Art Gallery, Mahwah, NJ (traveled to Hiram College, Hiram, OH; Sweet Briar College, Sweet Briar, VA; Junior College of Albany, Albany, NY; Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ; New Jersey state Museum, Trenton, NJ)
1982 Jack Roth, Drawings, Ramapo College Art Gallery, Mahwah, NJ
Jack Roth, Rosenberg Fine Arts, Ltd., Toronto, Canada
Jack Roth: Recent Paintings, Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ
Jack Roth, Gallery 99, Bay Harbor Islands, FL (also 1983)
1981 Jack Roth, Paintings, Knoedler & Co., New York, NY
1980 Jack Roth: Recent Paintings, Knoedler & Co., New York, NY
Jack Roth: Ramapo Paintings, Clocktower, New York, NY
Gallery 99 Presents the Paintings of Jack Roth, Gallery 99, Bay Harbor Island, FL
1978 Ramapo Series I, Ramapo College Art Gallery, Mahwah, NJ
1967 University of Florida, Jacksonville, FL
1965 Jack Roth—Goodies, Kornman Gallery, Tampa, FL
1964 Jack Roth: To Interpret Reality, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL Boxes, Collages, Constructions, Florida Presbyterian Colege, St. Petersburg, FL Kornman Gallery, Tampa, FL
Jack Roth, Washington Square Galleries, LaGuardia Place, New York, NY
Hastings College, Hastings, NE
1963 Jack Roth, Drawings, Grand Central Moderns, New York, NY
Jack Roth, Cinema I and II, New York, NY
1962 University of Kentucky Art Gallery, Lexington, KY
1958 Jack Roth, Drawings, Chapel Hill Art Gallery, Chapel Hill, NC
Jack Roth, Paintings, Duke University, Durham, NC
1952 Jack Roth, Gallery 5, Iowa City, IA (also 1953)
Jack Roth Paintings, Hansa Gallery, New York, NY
1949 Jack Roth, Contemporary Gallery, Sausalito, CA (also 1950)
Selected Group Exhibitions
2001 Abstract Expressionism: Expanding the Canon, Gary Snyder Fine Art, New York, NY
1995 Still Working: New Jersey Artists Over 65, The Gallery at Bristol-Meyers Squibb, Princeton, NJ
1984 New Jersey Curator’s Choice, Robeson Center Gallery, Rutgers University
1982 1982 Summer Group Show, Knoedler & Co., New York, NY
Fall Show, Rosenberg Fine Arts, Ltd., Toronto, Canada
Two Person Show, Gallery of Fine Art, Princeton, NJ
1980 Knoedler & Co., New York, NY
1963 60 Modern Drawings: New Acquisitions, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Graphics 63, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY (traveling exhibition circulated by the Smithsonian Institution)
Jack Roth and Rachel Roth, Paintings and Drawings, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY
1958 15th Southeastern Annual, Atlanta, GA
1st Hunter Gallery Annual, Chattanooga, TN
Knoxville Art Center National Exhibition, Knoxville, TN
South Coast Art Show, Sarasota, FL (traveled to High Museum, Atlanta, GA; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; Birmingham Museum, Birmingham, AL)
Some Younger Names in American Painting, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA
1955-56 Younger American Painters (traveling exhibition organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), Portland Art Museum (Oregon); Henry Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle; San Francisco Museum of Fine Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; University of Arkansas, Fayetteville; Isaac Delgado Museum of art; Indiana University, Bloomington, IN
1954 Younger American Painters, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY
Dallas Young Collectors Show, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, TX
1953 5th Annual Iowa Artists Exhibition, Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA
Exhibition Momentum Midcontinental, Chicago, IL
1952 Exhibition Momentum Midcontinental, Chicago, IL
Selected Public Collections
Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, TX
Boise Art Museum, Boise, ID
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
North Carolina, Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC Duke University, Durham, NC University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY
Selected Bibliography
Veranda (March-April 1999), 164.
Eileen Watkins, exhibition review, Newark Star Ledger, September 25, 1983.
Vivian Raynor, “Trenton: West Coast Expressionism,” The New York Times, September 11, 1983, 24. Tworkov, “El Arte Abstracto Nunca Muere por Ejemplo Jack Roth,” Goya 172 (January-February 1983), 151-152.
Jack Roth, Jack Roth: Recent Paintings, eh. Cat. (Montclair, N.J.: Montclair Art Museum, 1982).
David Newman, “Jack Roth,” Arts Magazine 55 (March 1981), 24.
Valentin Tatransky, “Jack Roth,” Arts Magazine 55 (February 1981), 35.
John Russell, “Paintings by Jack Roth,” The New York Times, February 1, 1980, C17. New Jersey Monthly (August 1979), 112.
Jane Blanksteen, “Interview with Jack Roth,” The New York Times, May 27, 1979.
Beverly Savage, “Artist-math prof. enjoys the best of both worlds,” Newark Star Ledger, May 24, 1979, 63.
Judy Juanita, “Montclair’s Guggenheim artist—Abstract Art from a Realist,” The Record (New Jersey), May 17, 1979, D4.
Jack Tierney, “Art Rules Jack Roth’s Life,” The Herald News (New Jersey), May 15, 1979, B4.
“Guggenheim Pries Announced for 291,” The New York Times, April 8, 1979, 32.
Egbert Jacobson, exhibition review, Tampa Tribune, April 5, 1964, 7D.
“Young Talent USA,” Art in America 51 (June 1963) 46-47, 52-53.
John Gruen, “60 ‘Drawings’—A Melange,” New York Herald Tribune, August 2, 1963, 9.
Stuart Preston, “Art: Display of Drawings; Works of 46 American and European Painters at the Modern Museum,” The New York Times, August 2, 1963, 24.
Art Digest (1963).
John Gruen, “A Chance to Catch Up at Seasonal Group Shows,” New York Herald Tribune, June 9, 1963, 6. Art Digest (1953).
J.J., “Jack Roth,” Art News 62 (Summer 1963), 18.
