Alice Boner

Who was Alice Boner?

Alice Boner was a Swiss painter and sculptor, art historian, and an Indologist. She completed her training as a painter and sculptor in Munich, Brussels and Basel, where she studied with Carl Burckhardt. In her drawings she used pencil, charcoal, sepia, red chalk, ink, and sometimes pastel. Her early works focused on drawings, sculptures, portrait, full body studies, landscapes and nature observations. The artist also harbored a great fascination for the art of dance and created motion studies of the three dancers Lilly, Jeanne, and Leonie Brown as well as the Indian dancer Uday Shankar. Her sketches were spontaneous, a series of observations, that are usually performed only with a few quick strokes, and are focused on the essential characteristics of the body. The collection of the Rietberg Museum houses a variety of sculptures and statues of Alice Boner from her youth. Between 1926 and 1930, Boner made trips to Morocco, Tunisia and India with the dancer Uday Shankar. She decided in 1935 to migrate to India.