Alice Boner Diaries (India 1934-1967) (An Old and Rare Book)

Alice Boner - Artist and Scholar (An Old and Rare Book)

Alice Boner: A Visionary Artist And Scholar Across Two Continents

Apart from an insight into Alice Boner's keen observation of Indian temple- architecture and art the present selection of her diary entries also depict the struggles of Alice Boner, the artist. In her work she strove to represent the spirit of India which her intensive experiences of over 40 years in the country revealed to her. Her experiences also included contact with personalities of the calibre of Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Laxman Joo, Sarojini Naidu, Ustad Alauddin Khan, and her admiration of Mahatma Gandhi.

As a remarkable diarist Alice Boner puts her thoughts to pen in an elegant, eminently readable style. The reader feels with her the thrill and awe at the ancient monumental sights all over India, reads about her vision of the principles of sacred art, and shares with her the inner conflict of one torn between the two worlds of Europe and India. Over and over again this unique woman, with roots in the European culture, expresses her deep attachment to India.

Most of the diary entries are in German and English and these have been retained for the sake of the originality of her fine expression, interspersed with a selection of sketches from her vast repertoire. In addition, the German portions have been translated here for the benefit of English readers.

Alice Boner (1889-1981), was a sculptor and painter who settled in Varanasi, India, in 1936 and became one of the outstanding scholars and interpreters of Indian sculpture and temple architecture. For her unique contribution to the understanding of Indian art, she was awarded the 'Padmabhushan' by the President of India in 1974, and an honorary Doctorate by the University of Zurich. After her first book, Principles of Composition in Hindu Sculpture: Cave Temple Period (Leiden 1962), she also published Śilpa Prakaśa (Medieval Orissan Sanskrit Text on Temple Architecture, Leiden 1966), New Light on the Sun Temple of Koņarka (Varanasi 1972) and Vastusutra Upaniṣad (Delhi 1982).

A Commemoration Volume was published in her memory, Rupa Pratirupa (Delhi 1982). Since 1989 the Kala Bhawan of the Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, has a permanent exhibition 'Alice Boner: Artist and Scholar'.

On January 9, 1930 Alice Boner boarded a ship belonging to Lloyd Triestino in Venice. Her first journey to India thus began. The ship was called "Gange". In January 1936 she moved into an old, half-dilapidated house on the holy river Ganges in Banaras, which then became her permanent home. The ship "Gange" truly bore a symbolic name.

India was Alice Boner's dream. Oriental art fascinated her from her early youth on. On April 7, 1926 she saw Indian dance for the first time in Zürich. A short note in her diary says: "Evening in the Kursaal: a lot of kitsch and a revelation." This revelation was Uday Shankar. His dance convinced her that Indian art has something special to say to Europeans.

Alice Boner met Uday Shankar again in 1929 when he performed in Paris with his French partner Simkie. Uday Shankar was no longer happy with the accompanying music of records. He then planned to return to India in order to form a group of dancers and musicians. He wanted to present authentic Indian dance dramas to the West with an original ensemble. Alice Boner was thrilled by the idea and decided to collaborate. She hoped to arouse sympathy for this culturally important undertaking and to obtain active assistance in India.

This was the reason for Alice Boner's first journey to India. Already on the way, she wrote on January 14, 1930:

"Awoke on the ship in the Red Sea. A grand morning. Bright, almost transparent chains of mountains bordering the water-surface on both sides. A wide, as yet uninhabited, solitary world. Yellow stretches of sand in front of the steep slope of the mountain, zig-zag silhouettes, slightly moving play of waves. It becomes more and more beautiful. The mountain ranges increase and disperse, at the same time, into the air, into light and ether, delicately fading away. Ships appear and disappear in waves and smoke, majestic in the distance, almost touchable when near.

A sunset of immense intensity. For the first time one feels the southern spheres. The basic tone of the sea is deep dark, green-violet. In the distance, blue mountain-tops and above them the magic, fiery play, of red, yellow and greenish glow. Here the world has more form, more depth and much, much more bliss." (Quoted from Indien, mein Indien, Zürich: Werner Classen Verlag, 1984).

The expected help in India never materialized. Nevertheless, the two courageous adventurers, Alice Boner and Uday Shankar, did not let themselves be deterred. They returned to Paris in Autumn with only a single professional musician and with a team of Uday's talented, yet untrained brothers the youngest is today the world-famous sitar player Ravi Shankar and with other relatives. Uday's mother accompanied the group as the guardian angel. They could obtain some instruments and material as gifts, others they could buy.

Alice Boner rented a house in Boulogne s/Seine near Paris with a room for rehearsals. They prepared for the performances here: choreography, music, dance.

"In a diary one is one's own witness", Alice Boner wrote on September 14, 1952. This long series of diaries from 1934 to 1967, edited by her sister, Georgette Boner, together with Luitgard and Jayandra Soni, give one an insight into her life, covering more than a quarter of a century. And we, as readers, may indeed feel grateful to participate in its spiritual wealth. And what a richness has this unique lady conveyed to us of her way of life! We accompany the traveller along the outer journey to the East and the West, and along the inner journey of the seeker. We share her meetings with people of various disciplines. We experience how she perceptively opened herself to reality and conveyed it vividly. Indeed, we may undertake with her the crossing-over beyond reality into the unformed All-One, from which all phenomena originate, and into which they all return. We accompany this tireless art-explorer who discovered its secret structural principles and who then, after years of search, was rewarded by finding written instructions in palm-leaf manuscripts attesting her discoveries. We experience through this introspective and eloquent artist the struggle with the great work which finally took shape. And we are also allowed to read about the meditator's contemplation, the artistic-religious apprehension, the silent calmness, the serenity and joy.

Man as homo viator. Alice Boner was a pilgrim of the world, she undertook inwardly and outwardly the constant transformation of being on the way. "Caminando nos cambiamos" (journeying, we transform ourselves) can well be the motto of her path. For her the aim of life was what the Spanish call "hacer el camino", the pilgrimage of the traveller of worlds. Alice Boner went the way of the White Clouds, she followed the call of her inner destination: more and more to her self, realizing her self (atman), open to the mahatman, to being.

"Earth and sky are my home", she wrote on January 26, 1953 to be definitively at home nowhere on earth, this is the destiny of a person who has set out for the development of consciousness. Europe was not a permanent domicile, nor India. The real home is being, blissfully intuited in consciousness: Sat-Cid-Ananda.

Alice Boner did not, however, by-pass the richness of reality: she exposed herself to it, she let herself be open to it in order to cross over it into the One, amidst the richness of samsara, yet unwaveringly further towards the original source. All forms: the sea and the river, mountains, valleys, forests and deserts, animals and people, were messengers of ultimate reality for her. In change, in allowing one's own metamorphosis, in the waves of the stream of consciousness, the development of an individual towards ever greater openness for the message that comes from all beings is accomplished: the relation of all beings and the participation of each in the all-encompassing One. "Plants and animals and all forms emerge from a common uterus, in which all existence originates" (August 4, 1949). Dedicated in this way to the stream of coming into being and passing away, Alice Boner experiences the fullness: "something all-encomapassing lives in me above all, the correlations" (April 29, 1951).

Alice Boner, sculptor, painter, indologist, art historian and above all a quiet reflector of the inner self was unique as an individual and towering as a creative artist and critical scholar.

Her journey from the first decades of this century in Ziirich as a remarkable, sensitive and dynamic sculptress to the painter of those large canvasses emerging from the revelations of the experience of the Kali in India, give a glimpse of the transformation which took place in the artist and the 'self'.

As one looks back at her early work, especially in the reliefs called 'Adagio and Allegro', the very first thing that strikes one is her ability to capture movement, her figures are in a state of animated dynamic action traversing space and yet from within dynamic movement arises a steady stillness. Along with the juxtaposition of dynamic movement and stillness was her ability to experience and capture tenderness as in the sketches and sculptures of the series of 'Mother and Child': these provide a clue to the flame which guided these journeys. From the very start, there is a combination of an austerity, a discipline as in the portraits of 1907, 1908, 1915 and the easy flow of the brush in the sketches of 1926, 1927. All these expressed in a European context get transformed so easily without loss of an European identity into the remarkable sketches of 1938, 1940, 1941 executed in India. While she both anticipates and matches the quality of handling volumes of masses of Henry Moore in her sculptures, the paintings and sketches of the 40s approximate the quality of the charcoal sketches of Nandalal Bose and Abanindranath Tagore. She becomes, through her art, the bridge maker and a communicator, like her contemporaries in different spheres, namely, A.K.Coomaraswamy and Stella Kramrisch. In the thirties what they did through writing, Alice Boner achieved through painting and through that remarkable gift of being -designer of costumes of Uday Shankar. Had she not combined the skills and training of sculpture and painting and internalised the experience of Ellora and Ajanta, she could not have created the designs for costume and headgear for those compositions of Uday Shankar, today considered as classic. The deigning of the costume of a Nataraja has come to stay in all forms of contemporary dance. As patron, organiser, Director of the ensemble, she played a seminal role in the rejuvenation and recreation of both the neoclassical forms as also what we today recognise as modern dance.

But Alice Boner's journey was to continue at deeper levels and dimensions of consciousness, with as much ease and lack of self-consciousness. She settled in Banaras to watch the Ganga, to reflect upon its eternal flow, from the. Assi Ghat. One of the first expressions of this experience is the painting entitled Sun Rise from the Ganges (1945). No longer executed in a mode which could be confined to a stylistic school, she transcends boundaries. The centre and the radials of the Sun Rise on the Ganges are symbolic of the search of the creator. It is this inner transformation which gives her the energy to create the remarkable oils of the Stirya, Vigvariipa, Prakriti and Kafir in which the primeval energies radiate once again from the core of her authentic experience.

She took physical journeys between Assi Ghat and Ziirich at frequent intervals. These journeys were not only at the physical level. They represented the inner core of Alice Boner's whole personality. She did not give up her European identity and yet it was this European identity which was being constantly refined and chiselled at a subtler plane through an experience of India at the deepest plane.

Many have been puzzled by her unflinching commitment to Orissa, Konarka and the great oceans. But was this journey not also natural, because it followed the journey of the Ganga to the sea. And in this journey she found manuscripts, Shastric material at an intellectual plane which confirmed her intuitive insights into the fundamental tenets of the architecture, sculpture and painting of the land which she had chosen to make her home.

It is only befitting that her collections as also her creative work should be housed in the Rietberg Museum, Ziirich and the Bharat Kala Bhavan, Banaras. The two Museums holding the manifestations of this journey and search, I hope, will create through future scholarship, basis of a dialogue and a truly cross-cultural transboundary communication of the creative 'self.

Before Alice Boner passed away in April 1981, several Indian, European and American scholars were preparing a Felicitation Volume for her, containing articles and research reports, which was to appear in India, but which, sadly, had to be published as a commemoration volume. This volume evinces Alice Boner's significance for the history of art in India today. It was therefore appropriate to exhibit Alice Boner's work to a wider circle also in her hometown of Zurich and also in Chur where her family was registered. This publication together with the exhibition "Alice Boner and the Art of India" planned by the Rietberg Museum, Zurich, and shown in the Villa SchOnberg (in Autumn 1982) and in the Kunstmuseum in Chur (in Spring 1983), fulfilled this task.

It is a matter of great satisfaction that the Bharat Kala Bhavan in Banaras is showing Alice Boner's work as an artist as well as a scholar and collector of Indian art in a permanent Gallery. This is most befitting because she lived and worked in Banaras from 1936 to 1978 and had made it her home.

Alice Boner was a versatile, impressive personality. She was above all an artist-first a sculptor and then a painter-and she was an art critic who could recognize the significant in the great works of past times and foreign cultures, in the sculptures of Indian rock temples and also in the classical Indian dance which was despised and decaying at the beginning of our century, and she could explain, analyse and convey these intuitive experiences. Alice Boner lived a long life, was industrious, strong-willed, intensive, sometimes suffered privations but was nonetheless successful and highly respected. She was born at the close of the 19th century, and already in 1916 she presented her sculptures in an exclusive exhibition in the Kunsthaus, ZUrich; in 1930 she worked together with Uday Shankar for the revitalization of Indian dance; in 1936 she settled in Banaras in order to devote her life to Indian art and to religio-philosophical experience; and then she worked on three monumental books with Pandit Sadasiva Rath Sarma from Puri. The last great work Vastusiitra Upanisad had to be published posthumously, edited by her co-worker and successor Dr. Bettina Baumer.

This volume, intended as a supplement to the exhibition, shows the individual areas of work by Alice Boner: her life is sketched by herself, and also by an article by Dr. Georgette Boner on the significance of dance for Alice Boner. The artistic Oeuvre (drawings, sculpture and above all her oil paintings done in India) is, as a whole, honoured here for the first time by Ms Ines Brunold of Chur with illustrations, a few passages from her diary and by an introductory text. Alice Boner's aesthetic insights are presented in important articles, addresses or forewords to her monographs, some unpublished and some of which until now have been published only in German or Italian; these are supplemented by the reviews of her comprehensive and pioneering books on Indian aesthetics by Dr. Bettina Bhmer of Banaras and Professor Dr. Elsy Leuzinger, Zurich.

The editors of this book acknowledge with gratitude the numerous friends of Alice and Georgette Boner for their cooperation, without which it would have been impossible for the book to appear with such thoroughness. For the exhibition Dr. Ambros Boner drew the diagrams according to the "Principles of Composition".

The arrangement and production of the exhibition and the book were done in Ziirich through the Alice Boner Foundation for Fundamental Research in Indian Art and through the Rietberg Museum and we thank especially: Mr. Fridolin Miillervon Ins for designing the poster and book cover; the photographers Ms. Isabelle Wettstein and Ms. Brigitte Kammerer for the artistic advice on questions concerning layout and exhibition display. But neither the exhibition nor the book would have been realized without the extraordinary engagement of Dr. Georgette Boner, who immersed herself with all her strength in her sister's work and legacy, and who let her own work slip completely into the backgound-at least for the time being.

When I commenced with my work in the Rietberg Museum in 1972 the name "Alice Boner" was familiar to me only through her book "Principles of Composition". But soon I saw that as a collector and donor she had also made invaluable contributions to the Rietberg Museum. Besides the works of art donated by Baron Eduard von der Heydt the Museum had not been presented with such important sculptures from South Asia. There are works from North India, out of stone and terracotta, especially of the post Gupta period, of which some possess evident beauty and expressive power and some others are of iconographic rarity or of religiohistorical significance. I therefore felt the need to visit this scholar with her exquisite instinct for what is remarkable. On my very next trip to India after assuming office in Ztirich for documentation on Jainism, I made a detour to Banaras and met Alice Boner there for the first time. Later, I was her guest several times in her old residence at Assi Sangam. Alice Boner engaged herself here in her work for most of her long life, strong willed, with cool judgement and with a keen power of observation.

Today Assi Sangam is rented by the Alice Boner Foundation for Fundamental Research in Indian Art and the successor chosen and appointed by Alice Boner, the indologist Dr. Bettina B iumer, lives there in the same manner. I continue feeling happy in this place of thorough research which penetrates the essence of classical Indian art.

**Contents and Sample Pages**

This publication originates from an ongoing project, which began in 2008, By that time the Museum Rietberg had received Alice Boner's photo- graphic archive, which had been kept over the years by her great nephew, who in turn inherited it from Alice's sister Georgette Boner. Hence, when the project began, the Museum Rietberg was in possession of Alice Boner's entire "material" legacy consisting of her art collection, photo- graphs, library, her own artistic records (drawings, sketches, paintings) as well as personal documents such as diaries and letters.

Thanks to the systematic support of the Boner Foundation for Art and Culture and Memoriav (Association for the preservation of the audiovisual heritage of Switzer- land), the Museum Rietberg was able to launch a project to preserve and catalogue the diversified material consisting of thousands of documents. The aim was to digitize and incorporate all the archive material into the muscum's database and to make it accessible on its online platform.

The Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (formerly the Prince of Wales Museum of Western India), Mumbai, takes special pleasure in presenting the collaborative exhibition, "Alice from Switzerland- A Visionary Artist and Scholar Across Two Continents". This is our first collaborative exhibition with the Museum Rietberg, Zurich. The exhibition was conceived during the visit of Dr. Albert Lutz, Director, and Dr. Johannes Beltz, Senior Curator, in early 2012. The cultural relation- ship between the institutes goes back to the 1970s. In light of globalisation and modern museum practices, we have reframed our relationship. These are the principal categories through which we now function: a) a cultural exchange programme, b) the circu- lation of cultural artefacts, and c) a museum education programme.

Alice Boner (1889-1981) was one of the most fascinating but relatively little known Swiss artists of the twentieth century who travelled to India with Uday Shankar in 1930 to support his dance troupe. She main- tained this relationship with him and his troupe for a few more years before deciding to settle down in Varanasi for the rest of her life. In recognition of her contribution to Indian art and culture, the President of India awarded her the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award, in 1974.

Alice Boner (1889-1981), the Swiss sculptor and painter, led a fascinating and unconventional life whose passion cannot easily be grasped. She never stood still, never rested and constantly pushed ahead with new projects. Being an artist herself she became a patron who supported other artists. In 1935 she migrated to India to immerse herself in the Indian way of life. Shortly thereafter she started to cultivate an interest in Indian art history, developed her own art theory and took part in a broad transcultural exchange with inter- national intellectuals. Not without cause, the University of Zurich awarded her with an honorary degree of Doctor of Philosophy in 1969 and in 1974 she received the Padma Bhushan from the President of India, Shri V. V. Giri.

The experience of living in two continents and the remarkable range of her multi-faceted interests deem her a true cultural ambassador. Alice Boner contributed significantly to making India's culture known abroad. With Uday Shankar, she played a key role in the renaissance of Indian dance as a reputable art form and made it known worldwide. Through her artwork, her scholarly publications, and her collaboration with various artists she greatly added to a sensitisation to and understanding of Indian art throughout the world.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages