Edward Boccia career survey opens in all rooms of Philip Slein Gallery

The Philip Slein Gallery opened its doors on October 23 with a reception that marked the first time in its 23-year history that the space has been dedicated entirely to a single painter. The exhibition, titled Edward E. Boccia: An American Modernist, runs through December 19 and occupies the gallery at 4735 McPherson Avenue in the Central West End. This departure from the gallery's standard practice of using only the front room for individual shows reflects the scale of Boccia's output.

Philip Slein, the gallery owner, described the event as a major undertaking. He stated that the only venue capable of hosting a larger presentation would be a museum institution. Slein noted the intensity of Boccia's professional life, observing that the artist was constantly drawing when not engaged in essential activities.

Boccia was born in 1921 in New Jersey 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 joined the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis in 1951 and remained there for more than 30 years, retiring in 1986 as a professor emeritus. During his tenure, he taught with a rigor that encouraged students to find their own creative drive.

The current exhibition features more than 30 paintings from a career that spanned six decades. The front room displays large-scale works, including the nine-panel autobiographical polyptych Eugene's Journey and the 2004 triptych David's Death. The hallway presents mythic scenes featuring figures that appear to generate their own light. The final room contains a salon wall that traces Boccia's artistic evolution from a 1950s portrait to a piece painted in 2012, shortly before his death at age 91.

Art historian Rosa Berland, who is based in New York, wrote the companion book for the show, Edward E. Boccia: Painter of Nightmares and Dreams. Published by Hirmer, this is the first major monograph on the artist. Berland conducted 14 years of research for the volume, which includes fold-out plates designed to show the scale of Boccia's multi-panel works. She described Boccia as a polymath who studied philosophy, theology, and psychoanalysis but preferred his work to remain open to interpretation.

Berland credited Morton D. May as Boccia's most important patron, noting that May's collection was later gifted in part to the Saint Louis Art Museum. She characterized Boccia's trajectory as the story of a young man from New York who achieved success in St. Louis. The exhibition highlights Boccia's engagement with classical traditions and experimental surrealism, drawing on the work of Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, René Magritte, and Max Beckmann.

Berland argued that Boccia's work requires active engagement from the viewer. She compared the experience of viewing his paintings to reading a poem or a philosophical text, suggesting that the pieces demand a slower pace of attention than modern habits often allow.