Edward Boccia

Edward E. Boccia was an artist who lived and worked in St. Louis, Missouri and served as a university professor at Washington University, St. Louis. Boccia's work was mostly comprised of large scale paintings in Neo-Expressionist style, and reflects an interest in religion and its role in the modern world. The American collector of avant garde European modernism Morton D. May was the artist's most important patron, and he amassed an expansive colllection of Boccia's work.

Boccia’s work is found in the collections of major art museums including The Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis; St. Louis University Museum of Art; St. Louis Art Museum; Denver Art Museum; Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City ; Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale ;The Weatherspoon Art Museum, The University of North Carolina, Greensboro and the National Gallery Athens, Greece. A number of commissioned works are on view in religious and public institutions and the artist’s work in also in over 600 private collections.

Born in Newark in 1921, the artist first studied at the Pratt Institute and the Art Students League, New York. Boccia served in WW II in a unique battalion made up of his artistic peers. After the war, Boccia earned a BA and an MA at Columbia University while concurrently teaching art at the Columbus Art School in Ohio where he introduced the Bauhaus teaching method to his students. In 1951, he was appointed Assistant Dean of Fine Arts at the Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where he played an important role as a painting teacher for over 30 years. Boccia's appointment followed in the steps of other important modernist artists including the American artists Phillip Guston, Stephen Greene, and the German Expressionist master Max Beckmann all of whom worked at the university for a period of time. It is understood that the artistic culture of the university was in some ways formed by H.W. Jansen who headed the university gallery for a time, and was committed to modern art.

Boccia was an astonishingly prolific artist; there are over 1,000 paintings in existence including more than 50 monumental altarpieces featuring allegorical scenes in an Expressionist style. A dedicated craftsman, Boccia pictured his work as a mediation of a universal moral struggle. He is also linked to the mystical, occult, and theosophical traditions of modern art including the belief in the messianic role of the artist, seen in the work of the Symbolists, as well as the pictures of Paul Gauguin and Oskar Kokoschka among others. Specifically, Boccia includes numerous self-portraits, and uses countless examples of esoteric imagery such as the androgyne and the hermaphrodite. While Bocci'a work bears some similarity to the work of Max Beckmann, and American Surrealism, his work is also connected to the tradition of muralism and to the grandeur of the American artist Thomas Hart Benton. Boccia is currently the subject of all large-scale critical monograph in progress, authored by Rosa JH Berland, a first of its kind, in cooperation with the Edward E. and Madeleine P. Boccia Artist Trust, St. Louis, Missouri.

In addition to his painting, Boccia was a published poet and the subject of numerous solo exhibits, the most recent being the posthumous show at St. Louis University Art Museum as well as an exhibit at The Sheldon Art Galleries in 2013.