Bohemianism

Bohemianism has been an important feature of urban life for the last 150 years. In the 19th century, chroniclers described the bohemian's fate as tied to the city, the site of novel experience and nonconventional life. Twentyfirst-century urban boosters, concerned about the fate of the city, claim bohemianism as savior of the economic life of the city.

As popularized by writer Henri Murger in the 1840s, bohemianism was the way of life for Parisian artists, writers, and musicians who were newly severed from the old system of art patronage and thrown into the market. In Murger's stories, new urban amenities such as furnished rooms, apartments, hotels, pawnshops, and restaurants, as well as a commercial market for art, facilitated the ability of individuals to live unconventional lives, but urban conditions did not create bohemians. In these years, urban bohemians also appeared in venues such as Thackeray's Vanity Fair, with its bohemian heroine Becky Sharp. In the 1850s, a group of New York writers, artists, and musicians meeting at Pffaf's restaurant declared themselves bohemians. To them this meant cosmopolitan, sympathetic to the fine arts, unbound by convention, and openminded. Like their Parisian counterparts, the mid-19th-century American bohemians used urban institutions (such as restaurants) as public amenities and as frameworks for unconventional lives. Mid-19th-century selfdefined bohemians, whether in Paris or New York, typically led sexual lives unconstrained by marriage.

In the 1890s, American cities across the nation took up the Bohemian banner and gave it a new meaning. George DuMaurier's bestselling novel Trilby (1894), which describes the bohemian life of Parisian artists, became a popular play and reintroduced bohemianism to Americans. Giacomo Puccini's 1896 opera, La Boheme, retold, again, Murger's stories and played in Los Angeles and New York. Cities such as Buffalo, Boston, Oakland, Fort Worth, and Cincinnati created new publications with titles like The Bohemian, the New Bohemian, and the Amateur Bohemian. The bohemians behind these magazines often saw themselves as promoters of art and culture, but they had little in common with their more unconventional ancestors. The Fort Worth publication, for example, had a section for temperance and Bible stories, and the Cincinnati magazine promoted service, uplift, and [Page 85]efficiency. But in the 1890s, to be bohemian was to be upto-date, and in many cities restaurant owners advertised their bohemian atmospheres.

It was, however, Greenwich Village that in the years from 1890 to 1920 became the quintessential bohemian neighborhood. Rather than a collection of individual bohemians, the Village fostered networks of people promoting the development of new art, new literature, new politics, and new gender relations. In the Village, a pluralistic mixing of classes, ethnic groups, and the sexes helped to produce a new American culture and a new enthusiasm for the potential of urban life. The bohemian mix of radical politics, culture, and modernity helped make New York City the leading American city. But bohemia also could be found in small scale cosmopolitan centers like Taos, New Mexico; Woodstock, New York; Carmel, California; and Davenport, Iowa. In Greenwich Village, it was not simply urban amenities that helped to sustain the bohemian quarter—it was the diverse cultural experiences made possible by the metropolis which bohemians in the Village promoted as the modern way of life.

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