Jack Roth and his color of cello
- Patrick Theimer
- Jul 13
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 1
Jack Roth was born in Brockway, Pennsylvania in 1927; entered Penn State at age 16; paused school to serve in WWII; went on to study painting under Rothko, Still and Diebenkorn; and by all accounts was a polymath earning multiple degrees in chemistry and mathematics along the way. After a solo exhibition at the Hansa Gallery in 1953, Roth was selected to be part of the 1954 Younger American Painters exhibition at the Guggenheim, a show that would turn into a two-year international traveling show. And even though he would then go on to exhibit alongside Rothko, Still and Diebenkorn, not to mention Baziotes, Gottlieb, Guston, Klein, de Kooning, Motherwell and Pollock, his star seemed to languish through most of the later 60's and 70's. Knoedler picked him up in 1978, which was remarkably the first major NYC gallery of his career. But despite becoming a Guggenheim fellow the year after that, and a slew of sold out shows proving Roth had never skipped a beat... the art world moved past him. Roth struggled with his health soon after, including eventual Alzheimers, and by the early 1990's he had stopped painting. Jack Roth died in 2004.
Roth's paintings seem to me to be moments of intense release, eruptions to color the ones and zeros that formulate a quantum construction. Their minimalism is captured in the absence of permanence -- they are always full, shimmering and lush, but invitingly incomplete. They are like a jigsaw puzzle spread out on the floor fashioning your eyes to find the fit. The way to see is entirely up to the seer. You likely discover it's missing a piece or two, but only after you're done putting it together. You may have been conditioned to expect what was pictured on the front of the box. But now it's something else.
Roth's Aleph Not was painted in 1976, and it represents a period for Roth that positions a sort of formula in the way he begins to break up the surface with diluted color and motion tension in flat spaces. Given his disciplines in math, I think it's safe to assume the title is a reference to infinity. The color makes us aware that there is more to the space than what is occupied, but the attractions are working like polarizing magnets. These pieces will never, ever fit together. The closer they get to each other, the more likely they will be pushed away. Nothing belongs. It's all torso and limbs. I see Frankenstein. A patchwork palpability. I swear every time I look at it something has moved an inch to the left or right.
The painting presents as a sort of Roth petri dish for the way he approached color. Neither Albers nor Hoffman has much input here. Mustard is a common color, and pale purple, and an almost florescent lime. Not exactly primary. But I think it's making color uncomfortable that serves Roth in a way that can only be explained with his own poetry. Maybe he'd call it George, best understood in Roth's prose:
Cello is the color you can't unsee, the color of a sudden tempest, of a desire to be unfaithful. It needs the company of others but its will is to stand alone. I think perhaps Roth used cello to color the space between the colors, building that line of tension to separate as much as connect. You will find it weaving a scattered horizon to hold still a violent day in New Synthesis #12; charting a cartographic outline to a bird's view of a fertile field in his 1979 Untitled; and cracking the faults of a growing swell in his watercolor Untitled (Figure) 1981. Roth's use of this "anti-line" was as harmonic as it was disorderly, a restraint to separate the tension of colors not meant to coexist.
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