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.