Bohemianism
Key texts: A Prince of Bohemia (1840) - Balzac
Related: Romanticism - art - avant-garde cultures - opposition - outsider - Paris - subculture - lifestyle
Lise the bohemian (1868) - Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Conventional wisdom often associate 'bohemians' with drugs and self-induced poverty, but, overall, many of the most talented European and American literary figures of the last century and a half have had a bohemian cast, so that a list of bohemians would be tediously long. Even a bourgeois writer like Honoré de Balzac approved of Bohemia, although most bourgeois did not. In fact, bourgeois and bohemian were often cited as opposites. David Brooks's book Bobos in Paradise (2000) describes the history of this clash and the modern melding of bohemia and the bourgeoisie into a new educated upper class -- "Bourgeois bohemians", abbreviated to "Bobos". [Jun 2006]
Bohemia is a place where you can live and work cheaply, and behave unconventionally; a community of free souls far beyond the pale of respectable society. Bohemia flourished in many cities in the 19th and early 20th century: in Schwabing in Munich, Germany; Montmartre and Montparnasse in Paris, France; Greenwich Village in New York City, North Beach and later Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, USA; and in Chelsea, Fitzrovia and Soho in London. Modern Bohemias include Dali in China; Chiang Rai in Thailand and Kathmandu in Nepal. [Apr 2006]
1862 quote: "The term 'Bohemian' has come to be very commonly accepted in our day as the description of a certain kind of literary gipsey, no matter in what language he speaks, or what city he inhabits .... A Bohemian is simply an artist or littérateur who, consciously or unconsciously, secedes from conventionality in life and in art." ["Westminster Review," 1862]
Mina Loy (1909), photo by Stephen Haweis
It takes courage to break rules
It takes courage to break rules. The various experimental, counter-cultural or otherwise Bohemian literary movements of 19th Century Europe found this courage by banding into tribes.
It is particularly impossible to study the works of seminal French poets like Baudelaire, Verlaine or Rimbaud without feeling smothered by labels, cross-groupings, re-definitions of previous boundaries and other contemporary attempts to define their right to create free verse about honest feelings.
Bohemianism
Though a Bohemian is a native of the Czech province of Bohemia, a secondary meaning for 'Bohemian' emerged in 19th century France. The term was used to describe a group of artists, writers, and disenchanted people of all sorts who wished to live a non-traditional lifestyle. The term reflects the French perception since the 15th century that the gypsies had come from Bohemia. Literary 'bohemians' were associated in the French imagination with roving gypsies, outsiders apart from conventional society and untroubled by its disapproval, perhaps also a connotation of being the bearers of arcane enlightenment (the opposite of 'Philistines') and perhaps silently accused too of being careless of personal hygiene. Henri Murger's collection of short stories, Scènes de la Vie de Bohème ('Scenes of Bohemian Life'), published in 1845, popularized the term in France. Ideas from Murger's collection formed the theme of Giacomo Puccini's opera La Bohème (1896). In English, 'bohemian' in this sense was first popularized in William Makepeace Thackeray's novel, Vanity Fair, published in 1848. Even Carmen, the Spanish gypsy in a French opera set in Seville is referred to as a bohémienne in Meilhac and Halévy's libretto (1875).
The term has become associated with various artistic or academic communities and is used as a generalized adjective describing such people, environs, or situations: "bohemian" is defined in The American College Dictionary as "a person with artistic or intellectual tendencies, who lives and acts with no regard for conventional rules of behavior."
Conventional Americans often associate 'bohemians' with drugs and self-induced poverty, but, overall, many of the most talented European and American literary figures of the last century and a half have had a bohemian cast, so that a list of bohemians would be tediously long. Even a bourgeois writer like Honoré de Balzac approved of Bohemia, although most bourgeois did not. In fact, the two groups were often cited as opposites. David Brooks's book "Bobos in Paradise" describes the history of this clash and the modern melding of bohemia and the bourgeoisie into a new educated upper class -- "Bourgeois bohemians", abbreviated to "Bobos".
Bohemia was a place where you could live and work cheaply, and behave unconventionally; a community of free souls far beyond the pale of respectable society. Bohemia flourished in many cities in the 19th and early 20th century: in Schwabing in Munich, Germany; Montmartre and Montparnasse in Paris, France; Greenwich Village in New York City, North Beach and later Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, USA; and in Chelsea, Fitzrovia and Soho in London. Modern Bohemias include Dali in China; Chiang Rai in Thailand; Kathmandu in Nepal; and Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
"The term 'Bohemian' has come to be very commonly accepted in our day as the description of a certain kind of literary gipsey, no matter in what language he speaks, or what city he inhabits .... A Bohemian is simply an artist or littérateur who, consciously or unconsciously, secedes from conventionality in life and in art." (Westminster Review, 1862, noted at [1] (http://www.etymonline.com/b5etym.htm))--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemianism [Dec 2004]
Mina Loy (1882 - 1966)
Mina Loy (December 27, 1882 - September 25, 1966) was an artist, poet, Futurist, actor, Christian Scientist, designer of lamps and bohemian extraordinaire. She was one of the last 1st generation modernists to achieve posthumous recognition. Her poetry was admired by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mina_Loy [Apr 2005]
1830
Bohemia - the state of mind and way of life began in about 1830, the year of literary and political revolution and continued until 1914, the year in which the 19th century really ended. For men of genius and distinction like Gautier, Baudelaire, and Verlaine, Bohemia was a golden but transient experience. It was a time and place where misfits spent their lives outside society, choosing penury, squalor and freedom over prosperity and convention. "The Spirit of Bohemia" focuses on what we consider to be the true Bohemia - Paris of the 1800's - the original Bohemian period. London of the late 1800's will also be covered, as well as several contemporary periods including post-World War II, Beat and Psychedelic movements. -- http://www.bohemiabooks.com.au/eblinks/spirboho/ [2004]Paris
The first usage of the term "Bohemian" (meaning, literally, "Gypsy") to refer to the disaffected and impoverished young artists and students of Paris has been traced to a popular French journalist and dramatist, Felix Pyat, who wrote a series of essays about "kids today" in a publication called Nouveau Tableau de Paris au XIX Siecle in 1834. He described this personality type as "alien and bizarre ... outside the law, beyond the reaches of society ... they are the Bohemians of today."
The term did not catch on in a huge way, though, until 1845 when a writer named Henry Murger, himself a bohemian (and the model for his own character Rodolphe), began producing a series of stories about himself and his friends for a small Paris newspaper called Le Corsaire-Satan. These stories were later collected in book form and staged as a play, Scenes de la vie de Boheme, which was a tremendous hit and an almost unbelievably definitive influence on French society. Today this play is mainly known as the source of the Puccini opera 'La Boheme', but the opera was not introduced until 1896, when the Bohemian youth movement had already been old news for decades. -- Levi Asher http://www.litkicks.com/BeatPages/page.jsp?what=LaBoheme [2004]
Gypsies as bohemians
Goran Bregovi?'s soundtrack to Time of the Gypsies (1988)
Time of the Gypsies (1988) - Emir Kusturica [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
In this luminous tale set in the former Yugoslavia, Perhan, an engaging young Gypsy with telekinetic powers, is seduced by the quick-cash world of petty crime which threatens to destroy him and those he loves. -- Dawn M. Barclift via http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097223 [Apr 2005]
Emir Kusturica (pronounced koo-stûr-ÉT-sä (born November 24, 1954) is a filmmaker born in Sarajevo, former Yugoslavia. With an impressive string of internationally acclaimed features, Kusturica became one of the most creative directors in cinema during the 1980s and '90s. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emir_Kusturica [Apr 2005]
see also: European cinema
Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts (2000) - Elizabeth Wilson
Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts (2000) - Elizabeth Wilson [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
From Booklist
A British professor of cultural studies weaves a heavily footnoted but clearly developed history of the idea and culture of the bohemian. Lord Byron was perhaps the first to embody the myths of art becoming life, of transgressive sexuality, and of opposition to bourgeois mentality. Wilson moves easily from London to Paris to New York's Greenwich Village and the Weimar Republic, from the nineteenth century to the 1960s, as she tells mesmerizing stories of Augustus John and Baudelaire, of Jackson Pollock and Neal Cassady, of Kiki and Caitlin Thomas. She illuminates the paradoxes inherent in the bohemian ideal, such as the view of drink as both enhancing the creative process and dulling the oversharp senses. She traces with particular skill the place of women, who almost universally end up in the role of support and mop-up. She even traces the "been there, done that" phrase to the early nineteenth-century Parisians, whose habitual response was a blase "Seen it!" Bohemian themes of dress, eroticism, and excess are thoroughly explored. Fascinating. GraceAnne DeCandido --Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Bohemian Paris: Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse, and the Birth of Modern Art () - Dan Franck
Bohemian Paris: Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse, and the Birth of Modern Art () - Dan Franck [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Dan Goffman's chapter on Paris 20th century bohemian culture in Counterculture Through the Ages : From Abraham to Acid House (2004) is partly based on this book.
A legendary capital of the arts, Paris hosted some of the most legendary developments in world culture -- particularly at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the flowering of fauvism, cubism, dadaism, and surrealism. In Bohemian Paris, Dan Franck leads us on a vivid and magical tour of the Paris of 1900-1930, a hotbed of artistic creation where we encounter Apollinaire, Modigliani, Cocteau, Matisse, Picasso, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, working, loving, and struggling to stay afloat. 16 pages of black-and-white illustrations are featured. --from the publisher
Dan Franck
Dan Franck est un écrivain français, né en 1952 à Paris.
Il fait des études en sociologie à l'Université de la Sorbonne, et fait quelques petits boulots avant de commencer ce qui lui tient à cœur, le métier d'écrivain. Il reçoit le prix du premier roman en 1980 pour Les calendes grecques. Dan Franck écrit aussi en collaboration avec d'autres auteurs tels que Jean Vautrin ou Enki Bilal. En plus d'être écrivain, il est aussi scénariste pour le cinéma et la télévision. --http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Franck [May 2006]
See also: 1900s - 1910s - 1920s - bohemian culture - Paris