Jack Roth (Born 1927) was born in Brockway, Pennsylvania. In 1943, he enrolled at Pennsylvania State University, but his studies there were interrupted by his service in the First World War. After the war, he went to California where he lived in Big Sur for a while. In 1949 moved to San Francisco where he joined the California School of Fine Arts first and was first introduced to art there. He studied painting under Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Elmer Bixchoff and Richard Diebenkorn. Roth then returned to Pennsylvania and completed his Bachelors degree in Chemistry. Because he needed a way to support his family, he decided to become art teacher after he received a Master of Fine Art degree from the State University of Iowa. He was desperately looking for a job and sent out hundreds of employment applications but with no success, so he chose to return to academia. He applied for the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1954, but he was unsuccessful.
He wanted funding for the field of photography. In the same year, he had an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum of Art in the Younger American Painters show, alongside Robert Motherwell, William de Kooning and Jackson Pollack. This became the turning point in his life, and was one of the first major debuts of the Abstract Expressionist movement to be exhibited at a museum in America. His next move took him to Duke University where he both received a Doctorate in Mathematics and taught classes. He continued to create art while writing his doctoral thesis, and in 1963, Lieberman William, recommended to the periodical Art in America that Roth be named the new talent graphic artist.
