Andrew Anthony Bucci Jr. would be known throughout his career for his expressive use of color. During his long and prolific career, he would also alternate from total abstraction to theatrically posed figures. He explained the variation thusly: “About pictures, I don’t know what my conceptions are. [I guess] the word that best explains what I look for is ‘felicity.’ It doesn’t have to be abstract or realistic, or loud or subtle. Just what seems to have been the right idea done the right way.” This impulse-driven style is emblematic of Fauvist Henri Matisse, who Bucci would have seen during his time in Paris in the 1940’s.
Bucci was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, the son of Italian immigrants. In 1938, at the age of sixteen, the artist graduated from the St. Aloysius High School. As a teenager he took art lessons at All Saints College with Mary Clare Sherwood, a former student of William Merritt Chase. Bucci enrolled at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge and majored in architectural engineering. During the summers he worked for the Mississippi highway department and took watercolor lessons from Marie Hull with whom he developed a long-term friendship. In a 1992 interview Bucci said of her: “What she had was just a rock-solid technique and a fine sense of color. And she had a good native intelligence and intuition about what made a good picture.”
Following graduation from LSU in 1943, Bucci joined the military and was chosen for the Army Air Force’s weather officer training program at New York University. Subsequently, he drew weather maps for the 18th Weather Squadron and was stationed in England and Scotland. At the conclusion of the war, Bucci was assigned to Orly Air Base outside of Paris. He took this opportunity to study life drawing at the Académie Julian and in addition he received private lessons in fashion design which involved studies of different fabrics. Returning stateside, he joined the staff of the local weather bureau in his hometown.
In fall 1947, Bucci used the GI Bill to enroll at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and three years later earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. He spent the summer before his senior year at the art colony in Ogunquit, Maine, and after graduation in 1952 he studied fashion illustration at Parsons School of Design in New York, kindling an interest he had developed in Paris, and perhaps following in his tailor father’s footsteps. His time at Parsons came to an end when he was called back into service as a weather specialist, a consequence of the Korean War. He was stationed for fifteen months from 1953–1954 at Lockbourne Air Force Base in Columbus, Ohio. Upon release he continued in the reserves, ultimately attaining the rank of major.
Throughout this time and henceforth he remained active in art activities in Mississippi, including as an exhibitor and a lecturer at the Allison Wells Hotel art colony in Way, a small community in the central part of the state. His mentor, Marie Hull, was an active participant at the colony. In June 1955 he received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the Art Institute where he was offered a teaching job which he declined. He returned to Vicksburg and rejoined the weather bureau there, but the following year he was reassigned to Greenville, South Carolina. An exhibition of his paintings mystified at least one reviewer who said: “Mr. Bucci must get his ideas from somewhere! But Where? Only Mr. Bucci knows, for he says he paints like he feels.”
From 1956 to 1979 Bucci was employed by the United States Weather Bureau’s National Meteorological Center in Maryland. In 1961 he took time off and traveled in Europe for six weeks focusing on the art in museums. He became active with the Washington Water Color Association and was its president 1963–1965. He kept up a regular exhibition schedule in the Washington area as well as in Mississippi where he often conducted workshops. In 1967 he designed the five-cent stamp for the United States postal service which commemorated the 150th anniversary of Mississippi statehood; it featured a single magnolia blossom. Accompanied by his two brothers and an uncle, Bucci traveled to Italy in spring 1981, and in the fall he retired from the National Weather Service.
For a short period in 1984 he moved to Cleveland, Mississippi, to be an artist in residence at Delta State University. Three years later he ventured to Alaska, and then in 1989 he embarked on a sojourn in the southwest. Bucci received the Mississippi Arts Commission 2009 Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts for lifetime achievement in the visual arts and three years later he got a similar award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. Towards the end of his life he settled in Vicksburg, and several of his images were used by the United States of America International Ballet Competition which was based in Jackson. On the 100th anniversary of his birth, six separate venues across Mississippi mounted exhibitions of his paintings in celebration of his life and art.