An American Painter
An intimate journey of discovery of the life and work of American painter Edward E. Boccia.
Edward E. Boccia (1921–2012) is a widely collected yet often overlooked American artist whose compelling pictorial language reveals a vision of universal experience, love, loss, and suffering as well as a deep connection to literature, mythology, and the canons of art history.
During his long career, Boccia developed a new genre of contemporary monumental panel painting that functioned as devotional art while raising questions about ethical, philosophical, and stylistic problems in twentieth-century America. His bold paintings depict longing and desire, grief, and spirituality while remaining deeply connected to the legacy of historical Italian art. In telling the story of an artist in the Italian diasporic community, this book expands the field of American art history, offering a close look at a complex body of work and a riveting life story.
This book is to be published in Spring of 2026 by Hirmer and distributed by University of Chicago Press.
Thank you to our donors including ArtCare Conservation and our private donors many of whom are former friends and colleagues of the late artist.
We are also grateful for the support of the development of this project including The National Endowment of Humanities, The John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, CUNY, Queens College, Molloy University, Rockville Centre, New York, Washington University of St. Louis, Saint Louis University Museum of Art and the Saint Louis Museum of Art.
Edward E. Boccia, Bathers by the Sea, Homage to Max Beckmann, 1995. Oil on canvas, 44 x 30 inches. Courtesy the Calandra Italian American Institute.
Edward E. Boccia’s 1958 diptych, Dreams of a Sea Myth, one of several panel paintings on view in a remarkable show at the Calandra Italian American Institute, takes the foreshortening techniques of one of the painter’s influences—in this case, Jacopo Tintoretto—to their (il)logical conclusions. Echoing Tintoretto’s Miracle of the Slave (1548), a figure of opalescent black careens out of a lurid green sky, his elbow defined by a dash of white, thrust into the viewer’s field of vision. Tintoretto’s Saint Mark is here turned into a kind of Icarus, not levitating but tumbling downwards toward the boats waiting below. Of the sea, Boccia writes, “And yet, it is the sea—that vast and primal home of early origin—which revitalizes, in its ebb and flow, the very soul wherefrom my stirrings take their form.” The explicitly Catholic (and Venetian) meaning of Tintoretto’s work becomes something powerfully syncretic in the imagination of one who simultaneously preserves the specificity of Catholic belief while blending it with a mythical, even elemental, sensibility.
Edward E. Boccia, Dreams of a Sea Myth, 1958. Oil on canvas diptych, 69 inches x 57 inches. Courtesy the Calandra Italian American Institute.
Boccia, born to Italian immigrant parents in Newark, New Jersey, studied at the Pratt Institute, the Art Students League, and Columbia University before eventually making his home in St. Louis, Missouri, where he taught at Washington University—an institution that had been home to Max Beckmann (one of Boccia’s most abiding influences) and Philip Guston. Curator Rosa H. Berland attests to Boccia’s syncretism, and the Edward E. Boccia Trust usefully explains that Boccia is notoriously difficult to categorize, having been labeled, among other things, a Neo-Expressionist, a Neo-Renaissance painter, and a Magical Realist. The show at the Calandra Institute demonstrates Boccia’s comfort with making his influences known. Whether in the overt quotation of Tintoretto or the pointed reference in Bathers by the Sea, Homage to Max Beckmann (1995), Boccia’s ready acknowledgement of his forebears reflects what I want to call belief.
Boccia reveals himself to be a faithful artist—whether that faith lies in his influences, myth, the sea, Christian symbolism, or even perhaps theology. In his 2009 poem, “There’s Always Beckmann,” which Berland appends to the wall label for Bathers by the Sea, Boccia writes, “I don’t doubt the tulips / and I never question the roses.” No doubting Thomas, Boccia feels no need to peel back the flesh (the layers of paint, the canvas support) for proof of what is self-evident in the earlier artist’s work. Boccia faithfully takes up Beckmann’s use of thick, black outlines; nowhere is Beckmann’s influence so evident as in Boccia’s self-portrait from 1958. Similarly, Boccia’s oeuvre suggests religious faith—allegiance, if not outright adherence. In so insistently evoking the Renaissance by way of Tintoretto, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and a more generalized tradition of panel painting, Boccia seeks out something inclusive of but beyond formal, aesthetic, or pictorial influence. Of the nineteenth-century Aestheticist tradition and encroaching modernism, Stephen Cheeke has written of “the idea of an aesthetic substitution for religious forms of thought and feeling.”1 Boccia’s work resists such substitution. His work aches for a religion whose explanatory power might remain strong in the face of modern atrocities: he singles out World War II and the subsequent violence of a supposedly Cold War. Religious art has a kind of pragmatics to it, particularly in traditions in which the image is itself vested with religious power; one might think of medieval societies’ trotting out icons to perform necessary miracles. Art, in effect, just might do things in the world.
Edward E. Boccia, The Flesh Eaters, 1996. Oil on canvas triptych, 72 x 108 inches. Courtesy the Calandra Italian American Institute.
Boccia’s work demonstrates the psychological need for religion as embodied in plastic art. In one of the sketchbooks on display, Boccia writes, “painting is the dramatic presentation of a thing’d feeling.” What could be more of a thing’d feeling for the believer than Christ himself, the concrete embodiment of a nebulous God? The need for Christ as a thing’d feeling is nowhere clearer than in Boccia’s haunting triptych, The Flesh Eaters (1996). His son David having died twelve years before in 1984, Boccia painted several works in response, including David’s Death (2004) and Pietà (1984). Central to all these works is indeed the moment of pietà, of the mother (or father?)—in Boccia’s work sometimes androgynous, sometimes marked as masculine—holding a dead child whose body is beyond support. The most potent scenes given to us by Christian art are no doubt the scenes of mother and child—newly born and newly dead. One sees Boccia, in his grief, turn to pictorial traditions of a living religion that remains for him vital, if only in the realm of art.
Edward E. Boccia, Last Supper, 1977. Oil on canvas, 46 1/2 x 72 inches. Courtesy the Calandra Italian American Institute.
Boccia remained committed to the figure, subject to distortions and contortion, throughout his career, even as the Abstract Expressionists largely abandoned the figure in the post-war years. Mark Rothko wrote, “I belong to a generation that was preoccupied with the human figure and I studied it. It was with the most reluctance that I found that it did not meet my needs. Whoever used it mutilated it.”2 What is most fascinating about Boccia’s figurative project is that he leans into mutilation; mutilation in fact becomes the necessary condition of his art, whether in the forms of human-animal hybrids or the almost Baconian faces of some of the figures in Last Supper (1977). His notebooks betray a fascination with hands marked by stigmata. This makes sense; after all, it is the mutilation of the body of the suffering Christ that most influences Boccia’s faithful art. The historian Richard Trexler explains, “the cult of the body of Christ validated one of the strongest religious tendencies: to give form to power on the principle that power was imputable to objects,”3 including art objects. Boccia’s work’s power, both aesthetic and religious, lies in the fact that it bleeds.
Natalie Prizel is a writer and scholar based in New York City. Most recently, she was Andrew Mellon Senior Fellow in European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has taught at various institutions, including Bard College and Princeton University. Her book, Victorian Ethical Optics: Innocent Eyes and Aberrant Bodies was published by Oxford University Press in 2024.
Right now, an exhibition at New York’s Calandra Italian America Institute shines a a light on the under-recognized 20th-century painter.
Katie White
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Edward Boccia (1921–2012) might be called America’s forgotten Expressionist.
In the mid-20th century, the New Jersey-born artist was a favorite of curators and influential collectors. His paintings fused the language of Expressionism, Surrealism, classical mythology, and Catholic iconography in rhapsodic, imaginative tableaux vibrating with color. Most prized were his triptychs, a format that harkened to the religious art of centuries past. For a time, he seemed poised for stardom. While in his late 20’s, Boccia was recruited to teach at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, alongside the likes of Max Beckmann and Philip Guston. Morton D. May, a famed American philanthropist and celebrated collector, alone owned more than 1,000 of his drawings and 100 paintings. Today, Boccia’s paintings and drawings remain in some 600 private and public collections in the U.S., Europe, and South America, including the St. Louis Museum of Art and the Denver Museum of Art.
Edward Boccia, Last Supper (1977). Collection of The Art Students League of New York
But, even in curatorial circles, Boccia’s name is obscure—his fall into the footnotes of art history, remains a nuanced puzzle. Finally, a little over a decade after his death, the artist’s unique legacy may be coming back into focus.
Currently, New York’s Calandra Italian American Institute is presenting “Edward E. Boccia: Postwar American Expressionist,” an intimate exhibition of Boccia’s paintings, drawings, and journals made from 1958 to 1995 (the exhibition runs until February 21). This intriguing exhibition offers a window into a long, though under-recognized career, and an artist who infused modernist language with monumental philosophical and stylistic questions, and embraced rather than eschewed religious and spiritual themes.
“It’s a very intense experience when you’re looking at these images,” said Rosa Berland, honorary director of The Edward E. Boccia Artist Trust, who curated the exhibition. “Hybridity is key to many of these works. Hybrid creatures appear in so many of his pictures, and hybrid styles. It suggests, I think, the process and the awakening one finds in the creative process, but also revelation, through contemplating the nature of the soul.”
Berland first became aware of Boccia’s works when the St. Louis Museum hosted a posthumous retrospective of his work in 2013, for which she was asked to write a short essay. She soon recognized the complexity of his talents. Berland is not the only one to have woken the artist’s work and story. Argentine-American Eduardo Montes Bradley is currently working on “Looking for Edward Boccia” a documentary about Boccia’s life and legacy.
Edward Boccia Graduation Pratt Institute.
Aspects of Boccia’s life are truly cinematic. Born in Newark, New Jersey, to Italian immigrants, Boccia was drawn to the creative life at a young age. A technically dexterous painter, Boccia studied at the Newark Arts High School, the Art Students League of New York, and Pratt Institute, where he met his wife, Madeleine Wysong, before being drafted into the army. During World War II, he served in the covert 603rd Camouflage Engineers, known as the Ghost Army, a top-secret unit that engaged in battlefield deceptions including inflatable tanks, sound effects, radio deceptions, and other creative imagination to disorient the German army (in March 2024, he was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor).
Later, Boccia returned to the Art Students League, enrolling at Columbia University where he would earn undergraduate and graduate degrees with the aid of the GI Bill. In 1948, in his mid-20s, he was hired as the dean of the Columbus Art School and moved to St. Louis, where he would make his home until the end of his life. In the city, which was experiencing a postwar contemporary art boom, Boccia immersed himself in the Group 15 of Saint Louis, an arts collective that included Werner Drewes, E. Oscar Thalinger, Belle Cramer, and Kenneth Hudson, among other significant artists from the region. Hudson, who worked at Washington University, would soon recruit Boccia to the university and an ambitious art department that included Max Beckmann and Philip Guston.
Edward Boccia, Bathers by the Sea—Homage to Max Beckmann (1995). Collection of The Art Students League of New York
There, Boccia would fatefully meet the American philanthropist Morton D. May, who was the preeminent American collector of the works of Max Beckmann (his collection ultimately formed a pivotal gift to the St. Louis Museum of Art). May would become the primary patron and advocate for Boccia’s work (this siloed patronage, too, may have contributed to his later obscurity).
During the 1950s, Boccia drank in a rich array of influences from the St. Louis region including that of Thomas Hart Benton, whose vivid scenes of Midwestern industry and farming were imbued with drama and dynamism that captivated his attention. Max Beckmann’s work, however, proved the most pivotal influence on Boccia’s developing visual language (Boccia became deeply familiar with Beckmann’s work through visits to May’s unrivaled collection).
The German-born Beckman, who’d fled his home country for Paris and Amsterdam, after the notorious Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937, had chronicled the mores and debaucheries of Weimar cafe society with a keen perceptivity and had come to St. Louis, for several years, as he reoriented in the postwar world. Most notably, Boccia followed Beckmann’s embrace of the triptych ( Boccia would produce 46 large-scale triptychs and other multi-panel paintings including four large-scale polyptychs and six diptychs, throughout his career). Beckmann’s bustling, energetic multifigure compositions, with their expressive brushwork, too, shaped Boccia’s approach.
Edward Boccia, Self-Portrait (1958). Courtesy of the Edward E. Boccia Artist Trust, St. Louis.
Edward E. Boccia’s The Flesh Eaters (1996) a triptych that is the crowning work in the exhibition, evinces vestiges of Beckmann’s pictorial language, taking cues from the lively Paris Society (1925/1931/1947) as well as Beckmann’s Departure, Triptych (1932–1935). But also there’s an inscrutability to Boccia’s triptych. In the central canvas, a Deposition-like scene unfolds with a Christ figure, nude, hanging in the arms of an inscrutable figure behind him. On either side of the central panel are idiosyncratic, surrealist scenes of men and women smoking, a floating Buddha-esque figure, rainbows, and a box with feet inexplicably popping out of it. One figure, a noir-looking man in a fedora, reminded me of Edward Hopper’s self-portrait.
“What I would emphasize when it comes to Boccia is that when it comes to models and symbols and signs, everything is so layered and sort of syncretic,” explained Berland of this visual cacophony, “We look for precedents, but we have to understand that there’s almost a chemical combination, a disruptive way of putting recognizable symbols or styles or types in juxtapositions. Everything’s in contradiction, which creates contamination of symbols.”
Edward Boccia, The Flesh Eaters (1996). Courtesy of the Edward E. Boccia Artist Trust, St. Louis.
While many of Boccia’s influences were his contemporaries, the artist also confidently reached back generations and even centuries. One of the earliest paintings in the show, Self-Portrait (1958) is a penetrative representation of the artist that takes cues from Albrecht Durer’s iconic self-portrait from 1500. The artist mimics Durer’s scandalizing hand gesture, one that is believed to hint at the generative gifts of God and the artist.
“Boccia is a very erudite artist. He makes references to classical music, to Greek mythology, to Jesus, Old and New Testament stories,” Berland added. “There’s autobiography in the painting and references to Renaissance and modern artists as well as Baroque and Mannerist artists.
Boccia, who traveled to Italy almost annually, was informed by the Renaissance masters and frequently drew from Catholic iconography rooted in his steadfast and near-mystical faith. His works, he said, explored “the lyricism which sings through every shaft of light and gesture from Venice to Sorrento (the ‘eye’ of Titian).” In the painting, Dream of the Sea Myth (1958), a tempest of visions swirls together. The artist made the painting while in Rome. A view of rowboats in one corner of the painting recalls a moment standing on the San Angelo Bridge, which is lined with Bernini sculptures, and looking down toward the water. In another passage, the composition breaks open into abstract and geometric forms. A falling figure at the top of one panel seems to reference Tintoretto’s Miracle of the Slaves or his The Origin of the Milky Way (1575–1580)
Edward Boccia, Dream of the Sea Myth (1958). Courtesy of the Edward E. Boccia Artist Trust, St. Louis.
“He’s making a transition between figural painting and abstraction,” noted Berland, “He was very interested in the work of Cézanne. He talked about the building of shapes on canvas, and the process of seeing that we encounter in Cézanne’s work. Here we see some relationships Cézanne with his use of muted greens and blues.”
Religious themes are common and Boccia’s works were commissioned by Catholic and Jewish institutions in St. Louis in his lifetime, including murals for Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel Temple and at the Washington University Catholic Student Center Chapel. His embrace of these overtly religious themes made Boccia hard to place in the narrative of Abstract Expressionism postwar America, another factor that made have contributed to his obscurity (Berland also believes a lingering anti-Italian sentiment may have sidelined his fame).
Eucharistic imagery, however, becomes an avenue for expressing complex personal tragedies. His surrealist Last Supper from 1977 and disfigured St. Jerome from 1989y, hint at the artist’s own understanding of sacrifice, bodily suffering, and rebirth.
Boccia in his studio, St. Louis, 1981.
“The artist was actually suffering from quite severe illness at this time. He had a kidney transplant. There are references to the body and pain and also to loss, including the loss of the artist’s own son,” she explained. “The way that he worked and understood the world is like an Italian Renaissance artist, in the sense that he was interested in technique and the depiction of sort of illusionism and realism, but was also very devout.”
For Berland, this exhibition, which came about through collaboration with the artist’s estate, run by his daughter, Alice, is a small introduction to a complex oeuvre. The selection of paintings offers a curiosity-piquing window into a much larger narrative. Berland, who will release a monograph on the artist’s works later this year, has been grappling with the slippery complexities of Boccia’s work for a decade and says she is still only at the beginning of her work.
“I would look at the paintings and the colors would be so intense, but I would also have the feeling of being engaged, intrigued, but sometimes very confused by the symbols,” she explained. “Particularly as an art historian, you look for precedents or canonical models. But his work is very disruptive layered and complicated. He always said that he was searching for a way to depict the mystery of life. There was something alchemical to his work.”
Rosa Berland will host a curator’s talk at the Calandra Italian American Institute on February 6, 2025.
Twenty-five years ago, I embarked on a journey to rediscover artists whose voices had been lost over time. This isn’t about placing blame or uncovering conspiracies; it’s simply that their work has slipped through the cracks in our fast-paced world. My curiosity was piqued by connections to figures like Robert Frost and Sherwood Anderson, leading me to seek out Julius John Lankes in vaults across the country, Ernesto Deira in Paris and Buenos Aires, Calzada and his determined efforts to reconstruct the streets of Havana, Joy Brown and her early experiences under master ceramist Shige Morioka, Julio Silva and his deep connection to Julio Cortázar’s works, Andrés Waissman and his exploration of Jewish roots on canvases with his unique “multitudes,” and most recently, Attilio Piccirilli and his brothers, as I strive to rescue Italian-American sculpture from the shadows of modesty and obscurity.
There are many other artists I’ve brought back to light through my films. Often, all it takes is a tip from a Good Samaritan to uncover their existence; other times, I encounter champions of these artists who are eager to share what has been lost—or better yet, what I can learn from their lives. Through my cinematography, I aim to project their work into the future, almost like a conspiracy to give them a second chance to be revisited and reinterpreted.
Recently, I had the privilege of learning from Rosa Berland about the extraordinary life of Edward E. Boccia, a St. Louis native with deep Italian cultural roots. After years of resurrecting great artists, I believe I’ve found another one worthy of the challenge, time, and effort. If you haven’t heard of Edward E. Boccia until now, this might be the perfect opportunity to do so. If all goes well, we’ll soon have a film in progress, and Boccia’s life and art will find their place in public and academic libraries, reaching new generations of art enthusiasts
Courtesy of Eduardo Montes-Bradley and the Heritage Film Project.
Edward E. Boccia: Postwar American Expressionist
EXHIBITION OPENING
Tuesday, October 29, 2024, 6pm
Curated by Rosa Berland
A selection of paintings, drawings, and never-before-seen journals by the artist Edward E. Boccia (1921–2012) is on view for the first time in New York City at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute. Throughout his long yet under-recognized career, Boccia developed a new genre of contemporary monumental panel painting that functioned as devotional art while raising questions about ethical, philosophical, and stylistic problems in twentieth-century America. An imaginative and technically gifted artist greatly influenced by Max Beckmann and Philip Guston, Boccia produced work that expressed the crisis of morality experienced in the US in the face of war and consumerism. His bold paintings speak of desire, loss, and spirituality and provide a fresh perspective on what constitutes Italian American modernism. For more than thirty years, Boccia served as a professor of fine arts at Washington University, where he fostered generations of studio artists, thereby changing the landscape of American painting.
Exhibition curator Rosa Berland notes: “By reintroducing the visitor to Boccia’s experimental work, this exhibition seeks to create new dialogue around the diasporic practice of this important and accomplished Italian American artist.”
ON VIEW October 29, 2024–February 21, 2025
Gallery Hours: Monday–Friday, 9am–5pm
EXHIBITION OPENING October 29, 2024, 6pm
Free, open to the public, and held in person at the Calandra Institute.
RSVP by calling (212) 642-2094
Edward E. Boccia served his country during World War II as a private in the 603rd Engineer Camouflage Battalion in the Ghost Army (23rd Headquarters Special Troops), which was presented a Congressional Gold Medal in March 2024. Born June 21, 1921, in Newark, New Jersey, to Cono and Frances Boccia, he was recruited by the US Army while he was an art student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, before enlisting in August 1942.
Boccia was one of many art school students recruited for this top-secret unit designed to deceive and mislead German forces. Prior to shipping out to Europe, the battalion disguised strategic military installations along the East Coast from the air using camouflage. The soldiers served as expert deceptive artists during several major campaigns in Europe by deploying inflatable decoys of US military tanks, cannons, and jeeps to create dummy airfields, artillery batteries, and tank formations accompanied by sound effects.
The Ghost Army staged 20 battlefield deceptions from Normandy to the Rhine River. Starting in England in 1944, they traveled to France and Luxembourg and then to Germany in 1945. In September 1944, the Ghost Army staged the illusion of 20,000 US troops during General George Patton’s Operation Bettembourg along the Moselle River in France, securing an American victory.
Like many other soldiers, Boccia would sketch in his free time behind enemy lines and in bombed-out cathedrals and send the drawings home to his mother. He drew numerous portraits of displaced Russian, French, and Italian civilians along with his fellow soldiers in France, Germany, and Luxembourg. Among his closest friends from Company B were Bill Blass and Arthur Shilstone. Blass became a world-renowned fashion designer and Shilstone worked as an illustrator for major magazines like Life and National Geographic.
Sketches of fellow Ghost Army soldiers by Edward E. Boccia, 1944–1945. Edward E. Boccia Artist Trust.
Boccia sketched in his free time behind enemy lines.
Following the Allied victory in Europe, Boccia married Madeleine Wysong, a fellow student at Pratt Institute, in July 1945. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Columbia University and began teaching and serving as dean at the Columbus (Ohio) Art School.
Boccia was the youngest art school dean in American history when the couple had their first child, David. Their second child, Alice, arrived after the family relocated to St. Louis in 1951, where Boccia served as professor in Washington University in St. Louis’s School of Fine Arts until 1985.
He became well known through his televised art talks and demonstrations on CBS, NBC, and PBS and his public and religious art commissions. Among those commissions were four large oil paintings to illustrate the history of banking for the First National Bank in downtown St. Louis, 10 mural paintings for the Kol Rinah Synagogue (formerly Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel) in St. Louis, and the monumental mural behind the altar in the Catholic Student Center (formerly Newman Chapel) at Washington University in St. Louis.
Image of Edward Boccia wearing a suit and holding a pipe while seated at a table.
Edward Boccia, 1955. Missouri Historical Society Collections.
Boccia had a long career at WashU.
Boccia’s daughter Alice recalls many stories her father, who died in 2012, told her and the family from his time in the Ghost Army. “I have many fond memories of my father from my childhood, some of which involved him teaching me to march while he played the role of drill sergeant!” Alice said her father was very proud to have contributed to the defeat of Nazi Germany and grateful that he could accomplish this without having to take human lives. “He would be a proud recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal.”
See Ghost Army: The Combat Con Artists of World War II at Soldiers Memorial Military Museum from September 25, 2024 through January 12, 2025. The exhibit is organized by the National WWII Museum and presented by the E.L. Wiegand Foundation. Additional local support from Veterans United Foundation.
