Talk on Edward Boccia at the Calandra Institute, New York

Rosa JH Berland will give a talk on March 21st from 6-8 pm on the life and work of the artist Edward Boccia at the Calandra Italian American Institute as part of the Philip V. Cannistraro Seminar Series. The event is open to the public and all are welcome. We are most honored to have the opportunity to share the accomplishments and contributions of this important Italian American artist and teacher.

 

Edward E. Boccia: The Painter of Nightmares and Dreams

Rosa Berland, The Edward E. Boccia Artist Trust

This talk will examine the artist Edward E. Boccia’s (1921–2012) innovative approach to painting and the reception of his work, as well as his connections to his Italian heritage. Born in Newark, New Jersey, Boccia studied at the Pratt Institute and the Art Students League and went on to teach for more than thirty years at the Washington University of St. Louis. Called a neo-expressionist, a modern neo-Renaissance painter, and even a magical realist, Boccia had a practice informed by the great masters as well as the work of twentieth-century modernists such as Max Beckmann and Oskar Kokoschka. What makes Boccia unique is his creation of a pictorial language that synthesized the mid-to-late-twentieth-century experience with motifs and themes from Catholicism, literary criticism, the politics of anti-materialism, and the importance of craft.

The Book -Edward E Boccia-An American Artist

Edward-Boccia, American-Art, American-Painting, Painting, American-Painters, Modern-Art, Contemporary Art, Ed-Boccia, St-Louis-Artist, WUSTL

Updated January 2023

The Edward E. Boccia Artist Trust is delighted to announce we are near completion of our upcoming book EDWARD E BOCCIA -AN AMERICAN ARTIST. This book is edited and written by Rosa JH Berland with contributions by Dr. Alice Boccia and CC Marsh.

It shall be the first critical full length study of the artist’s work and will serve as the authority on an important American artist while engaging in a more general discussion of hierarchies of style and genre within American twentieth century art.

The book will showcase photographs of never before seen artwork, reveal the innermost workings of the Italian American artist’s mind and technique and present a picture of  creativity in mid century to contemporary America.  Publication date is 2024-25. We are currently in our final fundraising efforts.

All donations are held in trust until the publication. Thank you for your kind generosity and commitment to the legacy of this great Italian American painter and teacher.

 

We welcome support of any kind to help us fund the publication of this innovative book, a first of its kind only possible through the patronage of our friends, family and colleagues. Please visit our donation page at Fractured Atlas, donations are tax deductible as per IRS regulations. 

 

Edward-Boccia, Contemporary-Art

 

 

 

Donation to the Art Student’s League of New York

In the beginning of his career, the young artist Edward Boccia studied life drawing at The Art Students’ League of New York’s with eminent teachers such as fellow Italian American artist Jon Corbino and Harry Sternberg.

The Trust is delighted to announce a recent donation of two paintings by Edward Boccia to the League’s permanent collection: The Last Supper, 1977 and Bathers by the Sea, 1995 in recognition of this formative early training and the importance of the league and the meaningful experience of learning with working artists. 

Of this tradition of teaching young artists and creative professionals, Boccia said in 1949:

“It is the function of the artist to employ those means existent in his cultural and social milieu. Required are the variations placed upon art within the dynamics of a technological age. It is the purpose of the Columbus Art School to synchronize its curriculum to meet and affect the stipulations of the art professions.  The methodology for approaching problems is inspired by the social impetus in a creative education.” (Bauhaus Principles in Use Here”, The Columbus Dispatch 1949)

 

Edward Boccia The Last Supper, 1977

 

 

 

Tax Deductible Contributions to Support the Publication of the First Monograph on the Italian American Artist Edward Boccia

Art-Book, Artists, Art, Paintings, Modern-Art, Painter, American-Art, Italian-American, St.Louis, Contemporary-Art, New-Art

The tax year is ending soon and we are requesting our supporters and those interested in fostering and celebrating the legacy of Italian Americans’ contributions to art and culture to consider donating to our special project -THE FIRST EVER BOOK on Edward E. Boccia. Donations can be made via our Fiscal Sponsor website donation page.

 

We welcome any amount and hope to meet our goal of $10,000 USD before 2022!

 

Thank you to the donors who have already contributed. This innovative book is only possible through the patronage of our friends, family and colleagues. Please visit our donation page at Fractured Atlas, donations are tax deductible as per IRS regulations. 

 

Edward-Boccia, Contemporary-Art

 

 

 

About The Artist

Edward-Boccia, American-Art, American-Painting, Painting, American-Painters, Modern-Art, Contemporary Art, Ed-Boccia, St-Louis-Artist, WUSTL

Edward E. Boccia (1921-2012) was an Italian-American artist active from ca. WW II-2012. Born to Italian parents in Newark Jersey,  Boccia attended the Newark School of Fine Arts. He studied at the Pratt Institute and the Art Students League, New York, where he met his wife Madeleine Wysong. Boccia served in World War II, in the covert 603rd Camouflage engineer unit known today as the Ghost Army. He continued to paint and draw during his time overseas, sending his artwork home. After the war, Boccia earned both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree at Columbia University, concurrently serving as Dean and 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 Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where he taught painting for over 30 years, until his retirement in 1986.

 

Boccia was regarded as not only technically gifted, but also singularly independent and deeply dedicated to his craft. Called a Neo-Expressionist, the modern Neo-Renaissance painter and even a Magical Realist, Boccia’s practice was informed by the great masters as well as the work of 20th century modernists such as Max Beckmann and Oskar Kokoschka.

What makes Boccia unique, however is his creation of a unique pictorial language that synthesized the mid to late 20th century experience with motifs and themes from Catholicism, literary criticism, the politics of anti-materialism and the importance of craft. In addition to teaching, the artist spent countless solitary hours working on his large-scale triptych panel paintings, seeking neither official approval or an end to his exploration and experimentation, the artist painted into his eighties. A favorite artist of the important American art collector, Morton D. May, Boccia’s art is owned by over 600 private collectors and within the public collections of national museums and institutions such as the National Painting Gallery of Greece, Athens, The Mildred Lane Kemper Museum of Art, St. Louis, The St. Louis University Museum of Art and many others.



 

Beckmann Looking at My Model -A late picture by Edward E Boccia

Beckmann, Max-Beckmann, Morton-May, Edward-Boccia, American-Art, American-Painting, Painting, American-Painters, Modern-Art, Contemporary Art, Ed-Boccia, St-Louis-Artist, WUSTL

Did you know that the American painter Edward Boccia worked at Washington University shortly after the appointment of Max Beckman. We know that the American artist was indebted to Beckman in many ways, and he often acknowledged the strength of the German Expressionist master’s work.

It’s interesting to note that Boccia would inherit Beckmann’s painting easel and use it among the many others in his studio through the years. Recently, a late smaller scale painting entitled Beckmann Looking at my Model (1991) resurfaced on the market -what a fascinating piece — a reflection not only of Beckmann’s legacy in the story of modern art, but a moment in Boccia’s own artistic life.

 

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Boccia’s 1958 Painting Adam + Eve

Art, American Painting, 20th century Art, Old Testament Art

Boccia’s painting of 1958 Adam and Eve recently sold at auction, truly a lovely very early piece featuring the puzzling yet fascinating motif seen throughout a lifetime of work —the Icarus like falling figure. Interesting fact: The picture won a special prize at show of Old Testament art in 1958.

 

Art, American Painting, 20th century Art, Old Testament Art

 

Art, Contemporary Art, Old Testament, Religious Painting, Contemporary Jewish Art

Select Paintings by Edward Boccia

american-artist-edward-boccia-painting il pensieroso 1981

Edward Boccia Nereus Reborn 1960 .jpg

Edward E. Boccia Nereus Reborn, 1960, oil on canvas triptych, side panels 93 x 25, center panel 93 x 48,  Collection of University of St. Louis, Missouri

 


Edward Boccia’s career as a painter may be poetically referred to as a grand house with many rooms. Some rooms, although elegant, are lived in briefly. Other rooms, made more comfortable by the artist’s personal associations, are occupied for years. No room is permanently closed. The artist moves freely from room to room, constantly borrowing ideas from where he has stayed before. The paintings and drawings in this exhibition are grouped by thematic concerns beginning with character sketches done in France during World War II and ending with a nine-panel painting, Eugene’s Journey (1996) that draws upon all of the artist’s skills as a painter and poet. (Museum of Contemporary Religious Art)

 

 

The American painter Edward E. Boccia’s most important works were large-scale, often as multiple panels. The oil on canvas pictures required a rather long process including a laborious building of composition, form, and pigment.

The artist was inspired in part by the traditions of ecclesiastical art, including altarpieces, while inflected with the tone, style and modern pictorial language of artists such as Max Beckmann. Often Boccia’s paintings seem alight with a sacral sense of light, and the eerie shadows and spotlighting of the Surrealist school. This admixture comes together to create an arresting pictorial language that remains quite his own.

This gallery offers a selection of key works by the artist, among them some of the largest and most ambitious works, as well as some of the more disturbing and puzzling pieces.

 

To see such work in reproduction is certainly no match for witnessing the presence and shocking iconography of Boccia’s work, that dance between desire, images of stigmata, crowded spaces peopled with strange creatures and self portraits, awash in ominous shadows and illuminated areas of paint.

 

Never the less, it is important to showcase these remarkable pieces in particular, and make images of this artist’s achievements accessible to the public. In many ways this curated galleries expresses the way Boccia saw style, as an ends to a mean, namely the creation of truly mysterious, atelier style painting that had echoes of historic greats, not in terms of formal cues, but in the sense that all art should evoke a sense of the anima, the spirit and soul.

On the occasion of Boccia’s monographic show at the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art in 1996, the elusive and complex nature of Edward Boccia’s practice was summed up beautifully as follows

It is with the open eye of the painter surveying the pivotal movements in 20th-century art that we will see the work by Boccia that touches on Cubism and Surrealism, American Regionalism of the 1930s, German Expressionism of the 1920s, and Neo-Expressionism of the 1970s. For Boccia all rooms are open today, and it is for us to decide where we should linger. Boccia’s career literally spans a lifetime. (MOCRA)


 

Edward-Boccia, American-Art, American-Painting, Painting, American-Painters, Modern-Art, Contemporary Art, Ed-Boccia, St-Louis-Artist, WUSTL

Edward E. Boccia Mystique Marriage, 1979, oil on canvas, triptych, Collection of Jennifer Paternikis, Athens, Greece

 

4_Boccia_Wedding Reception 1979.jpg

Photograph of Boccia’s painting The Wedding Reception, oil on canvas, 55 x 63 in the artist’s studio c.1979

 

 

fig-5-boccia-1987-the-dark-night-of-the-soul

Edward E. Boccia Dark Night of the Soul, 1987, oil on canvas, triptych, Private Collection

 

 

z027-eugenes-journey-1996-68-x1841

Edward E. Boccia Eugene’s Journey, 1996, oil on canvas, 68 x 184, nine panel polyptych, Collection of The Artist Trust

 


All Rights Reserved, The Edward E. Boccia and Madeleine J. Boccia Artist Trust.

Newly Discovered Abstract Drawings by Edward Boccia

Edward-Boccia, American-Art, American-Painting, Painting, American-Painters, Modern-Art, Contemporary Art, Ed-Boccia, St-Louis-Artist, WUSTL

Edward Boccia is highly regarded for his synthesis of 20th century aesthetics, including expressionism, and a command of both historic atelier and modernist techniques. This collection of photographs show details of the artist’s abstract work circa 1960. Seen for the time, these images come from a series of private notebooks, journals and sketchbooks and demonstrate the depth and intricacy of detail found in these gestural works.

 

 

 

Selections from exciting new treasury of works will be featured in a upcoming electronic publication organized by Trust and overseen by scholar + curator Rosa JH Berland.

 

Publication date to be announced.

 


All Rights Reserved, The Edward E. Boccia and Madeleine J. Boccia Art Trust.

Art + the Sea -The Early Paintings of Edward E. Boccia

Edward-Boccia, American-Art, American-Painting, Painting, American-Painters, Modern-Art, Contemporary Art, Ed-Boccia, St-Louis-Artist, WUSTL

fig-3-boccia-1958-dreams-of-sea-mythEdward E. Boccia Dreams of Sea Myth, 1958, oil on canvas diptych, each panel 47 x 23, Collection of The Artist Trust

Fresco like matte surface is matched by a whirling fluid dynamism in Boccia’s early paintings such as Sea Myth, 1958. In the exhibition catalog published on the occasion of one of many retrospectives, the artist comments on the significance of the sea in his work:

“And yet, it is the sea—that vast and primal home of early origins—which revitalizes, in its ebb and flow, the very soul wherefrom my stirrings take their form.” He elucidates that as well the white sail is the “torn spirit” the upturned boat is a metaphor for birth, what the artist calls a “world embryo” who will stop Nereus’ abduction of the bird woman.” (Some Notes by the Artist” in E. Boccia A Retrospective Exhibition. October 30 – December 8, 1960. The Pius XII Memorial Library, St. Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri).

Edward Boccia Nereus Reborn 1960 .jpgEdward E. Boccia Nereus Reborn, 1960, oil on canvas triptych, center panel 93 x 48 and side panels: 93 x 25, Collection of University of St. Louis, Missouri

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