Alice Boner of Benares

Alice Boner 1889-1981

There are many wonderful treasures in the extensive and well-curated collection of the museum at Benares Hindu University, the Bharat Kala Bhavan, including a superb display of original paintings by the ‘Master of Mountains’ Nicholas Roerich, but a surprise treasure is the exhibition dedicated to the life and work of the Swiss artist Alice Boner. Miss Boner made Benares her home for several decades, living in a small house at Assi Ghat in the south of the city, and immersed herself in the spiritual and artistic culture of both the city and, by extension, India as a whole. Few Europeans of her generation had such a deep and profound acquaintance with India and with Hindooism. The exhibition celebrates her own work – sculpture and painting – as well as her intellectual engagement with traditional India art.

Her time in Benares, and her struggle to synthesize her European identity with her deep feelings for Hindoo spirituality, is recorded in her extensive dairies (written in part in German, but mainly in English) which have now been published thus:

Much of her intellectual work was devoted to translating and publishing a long forgotten Hindoo text, the Vastusutra Upanishad, which she regarded as a key to traditional Hindoo aesthetics and image making:

Miss Boner spent years studying Hindoo temple architecture and traditional sculpture in an attempt to ascertain their geometrical underpinnings. Most of her published writings are on this topic. She believed she had identified the geometric principles that form the basis for the traditional Hindoo plastic arts.

Although she was herself trained as a sculptor, and there are many fine examples of her work on display at the exhibition at the Bharat Kala Bhavan, she explains in her diaries that sculpture proved too slow as a medium for her rapid assimilation of Hindoo aesthetic principles. Accordingly, she turned to drawing and to painting. The feature of the exhibition in Benares today is her masterwork, a triptych on metaphysical and mythological themes entitled Prakriti-Visvarupa-Kali. A picture of the triptych in situ can be seen below. Unfortunately, no detailed digital images of this substantial and very powerful work is available at this time, and the Bharat Kala Bhavan is most meticulous in the ‘No photography’ policy. The beauty and depth of the painting must therefore remain a mystery to readers online, until they can see it for themselves. 

A quotation by Miss Boner displayed with the work says that traditional aesthetics appeal first and foremost to transcendental principles and metaphysical realities, and that if a work of art is also beautiful it is so because it is true. Beauty is truth and truth beauty, as Keats wrote. The Alice Boner triptych exemplifies this fact. She devoted over a decade to its completion. An exploration of the three metaphysical principles of Hindooism – creation, consolidation, destruction - its unquestionable beauty is incidental to its penetrating truth. 

It is surprising that Alice Boner's work - both her visual work and her intellectual studies - are not more widely appreciated, especially among those with an interest in sacred art and sacred geometry, fields to which she dedicated her life and made a profound and enduring contribution. The permanent exhibition at Bharat Kala Bhavan is a very fine monument to her work and celebrates her as one of the most important European denizens of Benares in the twentieth century.


Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black