Jack Roth: Animated Edge

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.”