Philip Slein Gallery fills its space with career retrospective of St. Louis painter Edward E. Boccia

Philip Slein Gallery in the Central West End is devoting its entire space to a single artist, something it has seldom done in its 23-year history. The exhibition, Edward E. Boccia: An American Modernist, opens with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m. on October 23 and runs through December 19.

The gallery, at 4735 McPherson, has typically used only its front room for individual shows. For Boccia, who lived in St. Louis for six decades, the walls are filled with works from across a long career. "This is a very significant show," gallery owner Philip Slein said. "The only thing that could be bigger than this would be at an institution."

Boccia was born in New Jersey in 1921 to Italian parents. A painter, academic and veteran of the World War II Ghost Army, he studied at the Pratt Institute and the Art Students League in New York, then earned degrees from Columbia University after returning from the war. While teaching at Columbus Art School in Ohio, he introduced Bauhaus sensibilities to his students.

He was hired by Washington University in St. Louis in 1951 and stayed for more than 30 years, retiring in 1986 with the title of professor emeritus. Art historian, curator and author Rosa Berland, who is based in New York, described his teaching as rigorous but open to students finding "their own kind of fire."

Boccia produced thousands of paintings, ranging from small seaside scenes to monumental multi-panel works. His style draws on classical traditions while remaining experimental, and his surreal scenes are rich in symbolism and storytelling. He kept working until his death in 2012 at age 91. "If he wasn't sleeping or eating, he was drawing," Slein said.

The exhibition surveys his work in more than 30 paintings. The front room holds the large-scale pieces for which he is best known, including the nine-panel autobiographical polyptych "Eugene's Journey" and the 2004 triptych "David's Death," one of several meditations on the death of his son. A hallway displays mythic scenes of ocean journeys and figures that appear to emit their own inner light. In the final room, a salon wall traces his evolution from a 1950s portrait to a work painted in 2012, shortly before his death. Echoes of Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, René Magritte, Renaissance masters and St. Louis figure Max Beckmann appear throughout.

A companion book, 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, among them several fold-out plates conveying the scale and detail of his multi-panel paintings, along with scholarly essays and historical overviews.

Berland called Boccia a polymath who studied philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis and history, yet did not want his work to be didactic or formulaic. "Don't worry about what my art means. Just experience it," reads the pamphlet she and Slein prepared for the show. She also credited Morton D. May, whose art collection was gifted in part to the Saint Louis Art Museum, as Boccia's greatest patron. "This is really a story of a kid from New York who found success in St. Louis," she said.

Berland said such work matters now because it demands engagement on several levels. "We don't slow down anymore," she said, comparing the experience to reading a poem or a philosophical text.