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

 

 

 

The Saint Louis Art Museum Acquires An Important Work by Edward E. Boccia

Oil-Painting, Painting, Art, Modern-Art, Contemporary Art, Artist, Painter, Italian-American, Creative

 

The Boccia estate is delighted to share that Saint Louis Art Museum recently acquired a triptych panel painting by Edward E. Boccia entitled Birth of Eros, 1960-61 through a special donation. SLAM is among over forty institutions allover the world that own Boccia’s work.

A key work among the artist’s many large scale panel painting Birth of Eros expresses Boccia’s  interest in the metaphysical concept of transcendence within the mode of painting and in the problems of contemporary culture, spiritual conflicts, and religion. The artist’s creation of a personalized vocabulary of metaphor, allegory, and symbol in an admixture of complex stylization was one of certain originality. Boccia clearly saw the role of art as the sublimation of the force of creative art; the making of an earthly object represents moral conflict.

 

Oil-Painting, Painting, Art, Modern-Art, Contemporary Art, Artist, Painter, Italian-American, Creative

An Extraordinary Painting by Edward Boccia -A Contemporary View of Religion in Modern Life

 

Edward-Boccia

This painting by Edward Boccia ‘God Within’ belongs to The Kirkwood United Methodist Church, Missouri.

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)


 

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

 

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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

 

 

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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.