Roth’s teacher printed the artist’s book from linoleum blocks as a parting gift to Leo when he left for Israel.
Leo Roth’s early drawings exhibited here, mark by their very presence, the absence of scores of paintings and sketches which were destroyed in 1947 when the artist’s wooden hut caught fire. His early works from Germany, the Kinneret yard, Afikim and from Latvia (on the eve of the war) as well as works from Afikim in the forties.
For example, the landscape from the forties exhibited on an easel, preserves traces of the “Mountain-woman” paintings which Roth painted in the Kinneret yard.
When Roth visited Latvia he returned with about fifty oil on canvas paintings. The few that survived are exhibited here.
During the second half of the forties following his meeting with the artist Shalom Seba, Roth returned to the style of painting he developed as a youth in Germany (refer to linoleum prints from 1930). From here on he abandoned impressionistic influences and strove to achieve plasticity, to sharpen his focus and work on form and symbolism in light and shade (in time and in death). During the fifties he gradually developed a painterly monumental approach, fresco-like works of large dimensions, exhibited here in the central hall.