Product Description

Since the early 19th century, the bohemian has been the protagonist of the story the West has wanted to hear about its artists - a story of genius, glamour, and doom. This book analyzes the many shifting meanings that constitute bohemia and the bohemian. With a huge cast of real-life characters, from Chatterton to Jackson Pollock to Augustus John, she explores the bohemians eccentric use of dress, the role of sex and erotic love, the quest for excess, and their intransigent politics. She demonstrates how, rather than disappearing from Western culture, bohemia is at the core of the most heated cultural debates at the end of the second millennium.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1333291 in Books
• Published on: 2000-10-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

From the Back Cover
Since the early nineteenth century, the Bohemian has been the hero of the story the West has wanted to hear about its artists: a story of genius, glamour and doom. He is variously the artist dying in poverty like Chatterton or Modigliani, a successful self-destroyer like Jackson Pollock, a celebrity like Augustus John. Elizabeth Wilson's remarkable, enjoyable Bohemians is a quest for the many shifting meanings that constitute bohemianism.

Wilson tells the best of stories with a huge cast of characters among the artists, intellectuals, radicals and hangers-on who populated the salons, bars and cafes of Paris, London, New York and West Coast America. She follows the women who contributed to the myth - the wives and mistresses, muses, lesbians and independent artists. She explores the Bohemians' eccentric use of dress, the role of sex and erotic love, their search for excess and their intransigent politics. She further shows how, instead of disappearing, Bohemia is at the core of the most heated cultural debates at the start of the new millennium.

'Vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, procurers, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, rag-pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars - in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French term la boheme.' Karl Marx, 1848

'The mania of young artists to wish to live outside their time, with other ideas and other customs, isolates them from the world, renders them strange and bizarre, puts them outside the law, banished from sociey; these are today's bohemians.' Felix Pyat, 1834

Customer Reviews

Interesting but too brief!
Some interesting insights (for example, into the ambiguous relationship between Bohemians and bourgeoisie) scattered among a series of too-brief sketches of bohemian life. Covers a lot of cultural ground, from the early 17th Century to the 1960s, but would probably be enjoyed more if you know more about those eras than I do.