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.

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.

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.

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 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.”

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)

“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.

“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.