Jack Roth

Untitled (Rope Dancer series)

1980

A pivotal talent and pioneer of the Abstract Expressionist movement while he was still in his 20s, postwar American artist Jack Roth created an immense body of work over the course of several decades. Today original Jack Roth paintings are widely collected all over the world.

After serving in both the U.S. Army and the Air Force, the Pennsylvania-born Roth studied art at the California School of Fine Arts, now known as the San Francisco Art Institute, under American painters Mark Rothko, Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff. Despite his studies on the West Coast, Roth returned to PA and earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry at Penn State University in 1951. He subsequently completed his MFA work at the State University of Iowa and earned a Ph.D. in mathematics at Duke University.

Staged in 1954, the “Younger American Painters” exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum was a seminal show for Abstract Expressionism in the United States. A young Roth exhibited there as a 27-year-old alongside Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell. The well-established art dealership Knoedler Co. in New York City added Roth to their star-studded roster, where his work appeared alongside paintings and sculptures by Alexander Calder, Nancy Graves, Adolf Gottlieb, Michael Goldberg and Frank Stella.

Over the course of his career, Roth taught math at several universities. While working on his doctoral thesis, in around 1963, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City purchased several of his artworks for their permanent collection, and he earned accolades in Art in America magazine. In 1979, Roth was awarded Guggenheim Fellowship in painting. Today, Roth’s work is held in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art and the North Carolina Museum of Art.

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