Boccia Career Survey Fills Every Room at Central West End Gallery

The exhibition Edward E. Boccia: An American Modernist opens today with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m. at Philip Slein Gallery in the Central West End. The show runs through December 19. It marks the first time in the gallery's 23-year history that the entire space is devoted to a single artist.

Gallery owner Philip Slein noted that the venue typically restricts individual shows to the front room. For this survey, the walls of the building at 4735 McPherson are filled with works spanning a long career. "This is a very significant show," Slein said. "The only thing that could be bigger than this would be at an institution."

Boccia, who died in 2012 at age 91, lived in St. Louis for six decades. Born in New Jersey in 1921 to Italian parents, he served in the World War II Ghost Army before studying at the Pratt Institute, the Art Students League, and Columbia University. He taught at the Columbus Art School in Ohio, introducing Bauhaus sensibilities to his students.

In 1951, Washington University in St. Louis hired Boccia. He remained there for more than 30 years, retiring in 1986 as professor emeritus. Rosa Berland, an art historian and curator based in New York, described his teaching as rigorous but open to students finding their own creative direction.

The exhibition features more than 30 paintings. The front room holds large-scale pieces, including the nine-panel autobiographical polyptych "Eugene's Journey." It also displays the 2004 triptych "David's Death," one of several meditations on the loss of his son. A hallway displays mythic scenes of ocean journeys and figures that appear to emit inner light.

The final room features a salon wall tracing his evolution from a 1950s portrait to a work painted in 2012. The collection includes echoes of Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, René Magritte, Renaissance masters, and St. Louis figure Max Beckmann. Slein noted that Boccia kept working until his death. "If he wasn't sleeping or eating, he was drawing," Slein said.

A companion book titled Edward E. Boccia: Painter of Nightmares and Dreams will be published by Hirmer during the exhibition's run. Written by Berland after 14 years of research, it is the first major monograph on the artist. It includes dozens of images, fold-out plates, scholarly essays, and historical overviews. Berland credited Morton D. May, whose collection was gifted in part to the Saint Louis Art Museum, as Boccia's greatest patron.