DOYLESTOWN, PA.- The James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown is pleased to announce the exhibition Wolfgang Roth: Art of the Theater on view from December 2, 2006 through December 31, 2006. Throughout his career Roth established an international reputation as a set designer for theaters and opera houses.

This exhibition features a selection of Roth’s set designs, prints, collages, drawings, paintings, and sculptures, which are drawn from the Wolfgang Roth Collection gifted to the Michener from the artist’s estate. This exhibition is curated by Constance Kimmerle, curator of collections at the James A. Michener Art Museum . In 1953, Roth and his wife settled in Bucks County , Pennsylvania , where he continued working as a set designer and taught stage design at New York University ’s School of the Arts.

Born in Berlin in 1910, Wolfgang Roth enrolled in the Berlin School of Arts and Crafts in 1926. Living in Berlin during the desperately harsh period after World War I, Roth became preoccupied with politics. In 1928 he enrolled in Berlin ’s Academy of Art and in his spare time designed sets for political theater groups. Roth joined the Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists of Germany, where he met John Heartfield and George Grosz, early experimenters in Dada photomontage.

Roth worked for the experimental theater innovators Erwin Piscator and Bertold Brecht, who embraced drama as a means of education and political change. In 1929, when Piscator hired former Bauhaus teacher Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Roth worked on Moholy-Nagy’s innovative stage designs that incorporated film, projections, conveyor belts, trapdoors and a revolving stage. Following the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933, Roth fled Berlin and lived in exile in Vienna and Zurich , where he designed sets for vaudeville, musical plays, operas and dramas and performed in vaudeville and the circus.

Upon his arrival in New York in 1938, Roth began designing sets for theaters and opera houses. Although he designed sets for such Broadway plays, musicals, and opera productions as Porgy and Bess (worldwide tour 1952-56) and Don Pasquale (Metropolitan Opera, New York, New York, 1955), Roth may be best known for his creation of The Littlest Circus, a dance-pantomime that traveled widely in North America (1956-63). Broadway’s first children’s show, The Littlest Circus was filmed for television by CBS in 1963. With a cast of seven, Roth’s one-ring circus dazzled the audience as lions, acrobats, clowns, elephants, and dancers performed The circus motif would appear and reappear in Roth’s paintings, collages, and lithographs throughout his life.