Jake Berthot (1939–2014) was an American artist whose abstract paintings contained elements of both the minimalist and expressionist styles.

[1] Throughout his career his work frequently appeared in solo and group exhibitions in both commercial and public galleries.

[2] Berthot was born on March 30, 1939, in Niagara Falls, New York, and, from age two, was raised on a truck farm in Clearfield, Pennsylvania, 175 miles to the south.

[3] The classes he took gave him relatively little grounding in the technique or history of art, but he learned much from hours spent in museums.

He also learned much from other artists, particularly Milton Resnick who, as he later said, took him under his wing and through his friendship and guidance I became more aware of the real possibility of painting.

He would apply a thick painterly surface to large shaped canvases[3] that were seen to employ the reductive means of minimalism, but expressing instead of restraining emotion.

I liked the blunt presence the shape had on the wall and then penetrating the surface in the middle in what I suppose could be called a Rothkoesque kind of way.

Although a pure abstraction, it has the size and shape of Monet's Water Lily paintings—14 feet wide in two equal sections— and has, as Berthot said, the feel of a landscape.

[12] A critic said this work contained a "poetic lyricism" that could be accessed "not at a cognitive level but at a more elemental, intuitive one.

"[12] The paintings of this period continued to employ ovals and rectangles in canvases on which the "materiality of pigment," as one critic noted, produced "a highly tactile surface.

"[14] Another critic wrote that "the shimmering, encrusted surfaces of the 'ovals' are reminiscent of Claude Monet's late Waterlilies.

"[9] His "Hard Line" of 1980-83 is an early example of this approach, showing a rectangle in a muted background having bright accents that a critic said were and unexpected fiery flame.

[11] In 1994, Pepe Karmel, writing in the New York Times, said of works like these: "Despite the lack of recognizable imagery, the paintings seem haunted by a nostalgia for representation.

"[15] The oval shape appears as well in Berthot's drawings and etchings of this period some of which had representational content, including most often an ovoid skull.

[12] Apart from a brief period spent in Maine, Berthot had lived in New York City from the time he moved there in 1959 until the day in 1994 when he moved his home and studio about 100 miles north of the city to a rural spot in Ulster County along the Hudson Valley in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains.

"[19] Summing up this attitude on another occasion he said that as he worked a time would come when he felt that a painting would take over his consciousness "to dictate what it wanted to be.

[9][note 5] While he was undergoing treatment for leukemia during the last few years of his life, Berthot produced paintings that have been seen to possess a high level of emotional content.

He later said the gallery's owner, Ivan Karp had enabled him to work full-time in his studio by giving him a living allowance equal to his teaching salary.

[43] The youngest of them was thirteen years older than Berthot and in that rural setting he had no companions his own age.

[3] At the age of 20 in 1959, he moved to New York City,[30] enrolled in a school to learn window display, and got a job in that occupation in a store in the Bronx.

[3] Shortly afterwards, he married his first wife, the poet, Ginny MacKenzie, whose job, teaching at Pratt Institute, enabled him to take evening art classes there.