James Roth Papers

Born in California, Missouri, on May 11, 1910, James Buford Roth came to Kansas City in the late 1920s to enroll in the Fine Arts Department of the Kansas City Art Institute (KCAI). Roth was hired along with many other KCAI students to work as guards at the newly opened Nelson Gallery of Art in 1933. Here he met Marcel Rougeron who was at the museum to work on some objects in the collection, and Roth quickly grew fascinated with the field of conservation, studying everything he could on the topic. In 1938, Roth received a Carnegie grant and spent the summer studying at Harvard University – the only school to offer instruction in restoration in the United States at the time. He returned to the museum to establish the Restoration and Conservation department, which he managed for over 40 years.

Aside from receiving commissions as a painter, many other museums and private collectors hired Roth to work on the restoration of their works by artists such as Titian, Vincent Van Gogh, George Caleb Bingham, Fransico Goya, Claude Monet, and Paul Gauguin. His clients included the City Art Museum, St. Louis (present day Saint Louis Museum of Art), the Toledo Museum of Art, Princeton University and Nelson Rockefeller. In 1953, Roth received world-wide recognition for his work on what was believed to be a 12th-century Chinese wall panel which was given to the Nelson-Atkins. Upon inspection of one damaged corner, Roth noticed a spot of blue paint showing through the layers of mud and rice husks in the panel and developed a method which successfully separated these layers, exposing an additional rare 10th-century painting beneath while preserving both works which we now know to be Two Bodhisattvas Burning Ritual Incense (50-64/A) and Guanyin Bodhisattva (50-64/B). After this, Roth was continuously sought after to give lectures at meetings and seminars and spent six weeks as a Visiting Professor at N.Y.U. in their Conservation Department.

In 1973, Roth retired from his long-time role at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and moved to the Lake of the Ozarks where he continued to sketch and paint. He died in 1990 at the age of 80.