Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people and with few permanent ties. It involves musical, artistic, literary or spiritual pursuits. In this context, Bohemians may or may not be wanderers, adventurers, or vagabonds.
This use of the word bohemian first appeared in the English language in the nineteenth century to describe the non-traditional lifestyles of marginalized and impoverished artists, writers, journalists, musicians, and actors in major European cities.
Bohemians were associated with unorthodox or anti-establishment political or social viewpoints, which often were expressed through free love, frugality, and—in some cases—voluntary poverty. A more economically privileged, wealthy, or even aristocratic bohemian circle is sometimes referred to as haute bohème (literally “high Bohemia”).
The term Bohemianism emerged in France in the early nineteenth century when artists and creators began to concentrate in the lower-rent, lower class, Romani neighborhoods. Bohémien was a common term for the Romani people of France, who were mistakenly thought to have reached France in the 15th century via Bohemia (the western part of modern Czech Republic), at that time a largely proto-Protestant country and considered heretical by many Roman Catholics.
Origins
European bohemianism
Literary “Bohemians” were associated in the French imagination with roving Romani people (called Bohémiens because they were believed to have arrived from Bohemia), outsiders apart from conventional society and untroubled by its disapproval. The term carries a connotation of arcane enlightenment (the opposite of Philistines), and carries a less frequently intended, pejorative connotation of carelessness about personal hygiene and marital fidelity.
The title character in Carmen (1876), a French opera set in the Spanish city of Seville, is referred to as a “bohémienne” in Meilhac and Halévy’s libretto. Her signature aria declares love itself to be a “gypsy child” (enfant de Bohême), going where it pleases and obeying no laws.
The term Bohemian has come to be very commonly accepted in our day as the description of a certain kind of literary gypsy, 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)
Henri Murger’s collection of short stories “Scènes de la Vie de Bohème” (“Scenes of Bohemian Life”), published in 1845, was written to glorify and legitimize Bohemia. Murger’s collection formed the basis of Giacomo Puccini’s opera La bohème (1896).
In England, Bohemian in this sense initially was popularised in William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel, Vanity Fair, published in 1848. Public perceptions of the alternative lifestyles supposedly led by artists were further molded by George du Maurier’s romanticized best-selling novel of Bohemian culture Trilby (1894). The novel outlines the fortunes of three expatriate English artists, their Irish model, and two colourful Central European musicians, in the artist quarter of Paris.
In Spanish literature, the Bohemian impulse can be seen in Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s play Luces de Bohemia (Bohemian Lights), published in 1920.
In his song La Bohème, Charles Aznavour described the Bohemian lifestyle in Montmartre. The film Moulin Rouge! (2001) also reflects the Bohemian lifestyle in Montmartre at the turn of the twentieth century.
American bohemianism
In the 1850s, aesthetic bohemians began arriving in the United States. In New York City in 1857, a group of some fifteen to twenty young, cultured journalists flourished as self-described “bohemians” until the American Civil War began in 1861. This group gathered at a German bar on Broadway called Pfaff’s beer cellar. Members included their leader Henry Clapp, Jr., Walt Whitman, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, and actress Adah Isaacs Menken.
Similar groups in other cities were broken up as well by the Civil War and reporters spread out to report on the conflict. During the war, correspondents began to assume the title “bohemian”, and newspapermen in general took up the moniker. Bohemian became synonymous with newspaper writer. In 1866, war correspondent Junius Henri Browne, who wrote for the New York Tribune and Harper’s Magazine, described “Bohemian” journalists such as he was, as well as the few carefree women and lighthearted men he encountered during the war years.
San Francisco journalist Bret Harte first wrote as “The Bohemian” in The Golden Era in 1861, with this persona taking part in many satirical doings, the lot published in his book Bohemian Papers in 1867. Harte wrote, “Bohemia has never been located geographically, but any clear day when the sun is going down, if you mount Telegraph Hill, you shall see its pleasant valleys and cloud-capped hills glittering in the West…”
Mark Twain included himself and Charles Warren Stoddard in the bohemian category in 1867. By 1872, when a group of journalists and artists who gathered regularly for cultural pursuits in San Francisco were casting about for a name, the term bohemian became the main choice, and the Bohemian Club was born. Club members who were established and successful, pillars of their community, respectable family men, redefined their own form of bohemianism to include people like them who were bons vivants, sportsmen, and appreciators of the fine arts. Club member and poet George Sterling responded to this redefinition:
Any good mixer of convivial habits considers he has a right to be called a bohemian. But that is not a valid claim. There are two elements, at least, that are essential to Bohemianism. The first is devotion or addiction to one or more of the Seven Arts; the other is poverty. Other factors suggest themselves: for instance, I like to think of my Bohemians as young, as radical in their outlook on art and life; as unconventional, and, though this is debatable, as dwellers in a city large enough to have the somewhat cruel atmosphere of all great cities. (Parry, 2005).
Despite his views, Sterling associated with the Bohemian Club, and caroused with artist and industrialist alike at the Bohemian Grove.
Canadian composer Oscar Ferdinand Telgmann and poet George Frederick Cameron wrote the song “The Bohemian” in the 1889 opera Leo, the Royal Cadet.
The impish American writer and Bohemian Club member, Gelett Burgess, who coined the word blurb among other things, supplied this description of the amorphous place called Bohemia:
To take the world as one finds it, the bad with the good, making the best of the present moment—to laugh at Fortune alike whether she be generous or unkind—to spend freely when one has money, and to hope gaily when one has none—to fleet the time carelessly, living for love and art—this is the temper and spirit of the modern Bohemian in his outward and visible aspect. It is a light and graceful philosophy, but it is the Gospel of the Moment, this exoteric phase of the Bohemian religion; and if, in some noble natures, it rises to a bold simplicity and naturalness, it may also lend its butterfly precepts to some very pretty vices and lovable faults, for in Bohemia one may find almost every sin save that of Hypocrisy….
His faults are more commonly those of self-indulgence, thoughtlessness, vanity and procrastination, and these usually go hand-in-hand with generosity, love and charity; for it is not enough to be one’s self in Bohemia, one must allow others to be themselves, as well….
What, then, is it that makes this mystical empire of Bohemia unique, and what is the charm of its mental fairyland? It is this: there are no roads in all Bohemia! One must choose and find one’s own path, be one’s own self, live one’s own life. (Ayloh, 1902)
In New York City, pianist Rafael Joseffy formed an organization of musicians in 1907 with friends, such as Rubin Goldmark, called “The Bohemians (New York Musicians’ Club)”. Near Times Square Joel Renaldo presided over “Joel’s Bohemian Refreshery” where the Bohemian crowd gathered from before the turn of the twentieth century until Prohibition began to bite. Jonathan Larson’s musical Rent, and specifically the song “La Vie Boheme,” portrayed the postmodern Bohemian culture of New York in the late twentieth century.
In May 2014, a story on NPR suggested, after a century and a half, some Bohemian ideal of living in poverty for the sake of art had fallen in popularity among the latest generation of American artists. In the feature, a recent graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design related “her classmates showed little interest in living in garrets and eating ramen noodles.”
Topic and mythification
The Bohemian topic shows an individual, preferably a male, 6 with an artist vocation, with a carefree appearance, striking but disorganized appearance, alien to the guidelines of behavior, etiquette, aesthetics and material obsession of the traditional patriarchal and bourgeois society, aspects that the bohemian usually considers superficial and, from a romantic perspective, barriers to their freedom. In the best of cases, the bohemian defends his permanence in the world of ideas, knowledge, artistic creation, intellectual enrichment, interest in other realities or cultural manifestations.
Bohemian characteristics
Civic stereotype
In order to legitimize its abandonment of bourgeois society and its permanent attack on it, the bohemian creates a stereotype of the citizen, consisting of an accumulation of contemptible and hateful qualities. This negative civic stereotype is juxtaposed with the bohemian’s positive autostereotype. The most widespread civic stereotypes are hatred for the arts, stupidity, greed for profit, narrow-mindedness, hypocritical morality, subservient spirit.
Individualism
All bohemian attitudes are based on a programmatic individualism that emancipates itself from the conventions of lifestyle and of aesthetic, moral or political judgment with the will to deviate as such and without fear of provocative effect (often with pleasure in it).
Symbolic Aggression
The stereotyped citizen becomes the target of manifold symbolic aggression. Outward appearance, dwelling and stylization in appearance are the most obvious, if not the only symbolic means of struggle. Even with open libertinism, which are understood as an attack on bourgeois marriage and the associated values of love, sexuality and loyalty, the bohemian tries to provoke.
Café
In the café, the bohemian finds on the one hand publicity that she needs to make her symbolic aggression effective – including citizens, mostly out of curiosity, in the bohemian cheeses -, on the other hand, the opportunity to meet like-minded people on the basis of Philisterhass and to combine bohemian enjoyment of life. Other motives also play a role: for example, drab, unheated living conditions, the necessity to find friends, patrons, admirers, imitators, seeking fame or a springboard to success, for the sake of external existence and inner self-affirmation. The most important bohemian cafés in Germany were Café Stefanie, Café Leopold and Café Luitpold in Munich, meeting points of theSchwabinger Bohème, as well as in Berlin the Café des Westens (also called “Café megalomania”), the u. a. by Ernst von Wolzogen, Erich Mühsam and John Henry Mackay, and the Romanesque Café.
Cabaret
The cabaret is on the one hand a meeting point and thus fulfills the same function as the bohemian café, on the other hand it is a field of action that can be a stepping stone to success, and thirdly a source of income that does not have the smell of civil work and thus of a die-hard one Bohémien can be perceived.
Bohème circle
The majority of Bohémiens belongs to a bohemian circle, whose members know each other personally, in which they meet (sometimes regularly) and to which they feel that they belong. The purpose of the gatherings ranges from intellectual discussion to drinking, readings, etc. Often a leader or master is at the center of a bohemian circle. His power over followers and friends can be de facto very large, but it never documents itself as an open command claim due to the programmatic individualism and non-conformism of the bohemians. If obedience is required, bohèmetum is suspended.
City
The relationship between the bohemian and the big city is characterized by fascination and rejection at the same time. On the one hand, the Bohémien needs the many opportunities (contact with like-minded, rich artistic and intellectual life, opportunities for making money), which offers the city, on the other hand, he is confronted with the full severity of economic struggle for existence. It prefers cities and neighborhoods that are economically priced, provide suitable infrastructure (studios, academies, pubs etc) and have a suitable population structure (other artists, students). The most common cities or neighborhoods that appear in connection with the bohemian are: Paris / Latin Quarter, Berlin, Munich / Schwabing, Vienna,Ascona and New York / Greenwich Village. Nevertheless, the Bohème also has rural centers (for example Ascona / Monte Verità). Many Bohémiens switch between big city and retreat to the country.
Art and literature market
Characteristic of the bohemian in this respect is the conflict between the programmatic disdain for success – every kind of success in bourgeois society is denounced as a sign of worthlessness – and the artist’s desire for action and assertiveness. The idealized esteem for art as something “divine” is opposed to the compulsion to divulge this “divine” to the mechanism of the market. Many bohemians try to escape this dilemma by pursuing a “bread job” or a “double literary life” in addition to their artistic activity.
Civil work
If Bohémien is forced to pursue a bourgeois profession in order to make a living, he usually sees this as unbearable slavery. With the affirmation of art, the negation of alienated work goes hand in hand. The concept of acquisition is assigned to the civic stereotype.
Poverty
The desired autonomy and thus the rejection of bourgeois labor requires economic capital (inherited, for example) or a willingness to give up. If it only reaches a certain limit, poverty threatens Bohémien. Therefore, poverty became a characteristic feature of the bohemian and often idealized and romanticized in their works. Parts of the bohemian are therefore close to the ideal of the simple life.
Financial coup
Despite the rejection of bourgeois work, the dream of big money is also dreamed, especially often, in bohemia. Since regular work for the above reasons is out of the question, the financial coup should put an end to all financial problems.
Politics
Turning to politics, Bohémien prefers radical revolutionary movements, but he usually represents individualistic deviations from organized parties and mass movements. The strongest affinity consists of anarchism, partly of a regressive character, intoxicating itself with the idea of destruction, elevating Caesarean superman, criminal, terrorist or barbarian to literary idols, partly to a spiritualistic-utopian anarchocommunism with humanistic-pacifist, Rousseauist, liberal, anti-industrialist tendencies. As soon as Bohémiens became politically activethey leave the bohemian. A German network publication for background coverage and opinions bears the name le Bohémien.
People
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 (boho—informal) 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.”
Many prominent European and American figures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries belonged to the bohemian subculture, and any comprehensive “list of bohemians” would be tediously long. Bohemianism has been approved of by some bourgeois writers such as Honoré de Balzac, but most conservative cultural critics do not condone bohemian lifestyles.
In Bohemian Manifesto: a Field Guide to Living on the Edge, author Laren Stover, breaks down the Bohemian into five distinct mind-sets or styles, as follows:
Nouveau: bohemians that are rich who attempt to join traditional bohemianism with contemporary culture
Gypsy: the expatriate types, they create their own Gypsy ideal of nirvana wherever they go
Beat: also drifters, but non-materialist and art-focused
Zen: “post-beat,” focus on spirituality rather than art
Dandy: no money, but try to appear as if they have it by buying and displaying expensive or rare items – such as brands of alcohol
Aimee Crocker, an American world traveler, adventuress, heiress and mystic, was dubbed the Queen of Bohemia in the 1910s by the world press for living an uninhibited, sexually liberated and aggressively non-conformist life in San Francisco, New York and Paris. She spent the bulk of her fortune inherited from her father E.B. Crocker, a railroad tycoon and art collector, on traveling all over the world (lingering the longest in India, Japan and China) and partying with famous artists of her time such as Oscar Wilde, the Barrymores, Enrico Caruso, Isadora Duncan, Henri Matisse, Auguste Rodin and Rudolph Valentino. Crocker had countless affairs and married five times in five different decades of her life, each man being in his twenties. She was famous for her tattoos and pet snakes and was reported to have started the first Buddhist colony in Manhattan. Spiritually inquisitive, Crocker had a ten-year affair with occultist Aleister Crowley and was a devoted student of Hatha Yoga.
Maxwell Bodenheim, an American poet and novelist, was known as the King of Greenwich Village Bohemians during the 1920s and his writing brought him international fame during the Jazz Age.
In the twentieth century United States, the bohemian impulse was famously seen in the 1940s hipsters, the 1950s Beat generation (exemplified by writers such as William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti), the much more widespread 1960s counterculture, and 1960s and 1970s hippies.
Rainbow Gatherings may be seen as another contemporary worldwide expression of the bohemian impulse. An American example is Burning Man, an annual participatory arts festival held in the Nevada desert.
In 2001, political and cultural commentator David Brooks contended that much of the cultural ethos of well-to-do middle-class Americans is Bohemian-derived, coining the oxymoron ”Bourgeois Bohemians” or “Bobos”. A similar term in Germany is Bionade-Biedermeier, a 2007 German neologism combining Bionade (a trendy lemonade brand) and Biedermeier (an era of introspective Central European culture between 1815 and 1848). The coinage was introduced in 2007 by Henning Sußebach, a German journalist, in an article that appeared in Zeitmagazin concerning Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg lifestyle. The hyphenated term gained traction and has been quoted and referred to since. German ARD TV broadcaster used the title Boheme and Biedermeier in a 2009 documentation about Berlin Prenzlauer Berg. The main focus was on protagonists, that contributed to the image of a paradise for the (organic and kid raising) well-to-do, depicting cafés where Bionade-Biedermeier sips from Fair-Trade.
Digital Bohème
The term “Digital Bohemian” is first documented in 1995 and was coined by Elisa Rose and Gary Danner, who, as the artist duo “Station Rose”, founded a public multimedia laboratory and made a name for themselves as pioneers of “net art” and “digital art”,
The term was taken up by Sascha Lobo and Holm Friebe in the title and content of their 2006 book We Call It Work: The Digital Bohemia or Intelligent Life Beyond Permanent Employment. The term “digital bohemian” refers to a Berlin group of freelance media professionals with Holm Friebe, Sascha Lobo, Kathrin Passig and others with artistic-creative ambitions, who use new communication channels to expand their individual scope of action. The Manifesto We call it workis particularly against the practice of permanent employment, on the grounds that it curtails personal freedom. Several aspects of the civic stereotype are applied here on the employee.
The predominant artistic-creative activities of the Digital Bohème are: the writing of texts, the creation of concepts, graphic design, design and programming. The classical artistic spectrum of bohemia has been expanded to include secondary cultural professions.
Criticizing the Digital Bohème
However, this “new form of free enterprise” came in the media from different sides in the criticism.
Journal concretely: “Involuntarily the authors work (…) however the neoliberal society drafts of those into which they originally wanted to liberate themselves. Because the clients from publishers and companies are most pleased about employees who are available around the clock for self-exploitation. (…) Lobo and Friebe owe the evidence that not only an elite, but a large number of people across all industries can succeed in finding their livelihood in the digital bohemian. ”
Journal art: “Their thesis that the ‘digital bohemian’, with its new forms of work organization, offers an alternative to the crisis of employee culture, still has to pass the test of time. Even if Friebe and Lobo do not want to have ‘written a Berlin book’: whether they could have succeeded elsewhere, may be doubted. ”
Source from Wikipedia