Bibliography
Franz Müller, « ‘Reiner Statuaire’. Otto Charles Bänninger – Porträts und Denkmäler », Neue Zürcher Zeitung, January 18-19, 1997: 68.
Richard Häsli, Otto Charles Bänninger 1897-1973, 1973.
Charles-Albert Cingria, Otto Charles Bänninger, Zurich, Graphis, 1949.
Otto Charles Bänninger studied sculpture with Franz Wanger in Zurich before moving to Paris in 1920 to join Émile-Antoine Bourdelle’s studio at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. The following year, he joined Bourdelle’s personal studio as an assistant. There, he met his wife, the French artist Germaine Richier. The couple married in 1929. The work of his Paris years, influenced by Bourdelle and Auguste Rodin, is characterised by bold movement; in the 1930s his work became quieter and more contemplative, seeking to renew classical renderings of the human figure, in line with his Swiss contemporaries Hermann Haller and Hermann Hubacher.
In 1939, Bänninger moved back to Zurich for good, though he was a regular visitor to Paris after the Second World War. The decade from 1940 to 1950 saw him produce an abundance of portraits. In 1942, the year he was awarded the International Sculpture Prize at the Venice Biennale, he produced this bust of the Swiss writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz. Its rigorous construction, carefully modelled volumes, and sense of inner tension thoughtfully rendered in bronze all place this portrait in line with busts by Charles Despiau. Ramuz was enthusiastic about the bust from the outset, “which is no mean achievement”, as Charles-Albert Cingria wrote in 1949.
Bänninger sculpted several leading Swiss personalities, including the collectors Oskar Reinhart (1946, Museum Oskar Reinhart, Winterthur) and Emil Bührle (1957, Kunsthaus, Zurich). He also produced several public monuments, such as the equestrian statue of General Guisan in Lausanne (1967).