proached the phenomenon of bohemianism from a
variety of perspectives, often interdisciplinary, com-
bining literary studies, visual arts, populär culture,
film studies, as well as music, and, not unfrequently,
arriving at conflicting conclusions. If for Arnold
Hauser, writing about Courbet, “bohemianism is and
remains an heir of aestbetisifng romanticism”, for T. J.
Clark, “Bohemia in mid-nineteenth-century Paris was a real
social dass, a locus of dissent’, while for Jerrold Seigel,
bohemianism is inséparable from the ideology of
the bourgeoisie.4 Recently, Lisa Tickner looked at
bohemianism through the prism of Bourdieu’s
theory of the cultural field, addressing also the
much neglected issue of gender.5 Marilyn Brown
and Sandra Moussa investigated the affinities of
the nomadic bohemian artist with Gypsies, while
Mary Gluck pointed to its engagement with popu-
lär culture and commercial entertainment.6 Step-
ping outside the magic circle of Paris and the long
nineteenth Century, Elizabeth Wilson explored the
patterns of discursive construction of the bohemian
myth, upholding again the belief in its social and
political intransigence, transnational adoptions and
contemporary endurance.7 Mike Sell, writing about
film, raised the long-avoided issue of the racial un-
derpinning of bohemianism, while Daniel Hurewitz,
by contrast, acknowledged its concurrence with the
gay libération movement in Los Angeles of the first
half of the twentieth Century.8 But even those stud-
ies which expand the geography of bohemianism
beyond Paris hardly venture beyond Western Europe
and Northern America.
If the foundation script of the bohemian culture
is the myth of freedom and rébellion attributed to

4 HAUSER, A.: Social History of Art. Vol. 4: Realism, Natural-
ien!, The Film Age [1951]. London - New York 1999, p. 39;
CLARK, T. J.: Image of the People. Gustave Courbet and the 1848
Revolution. London — New York 1973, p. 33; SEIGEL, J.:
Bohemian Paris. Culture, Politics and the Boundaries of Bourgeois
Life, 1830- 1930. New York 1986.
5 TICKNER, L.: Bohemianism and the Cultural Field: Trilhy
and Tarr. In: Art History, 34, 2011, No. 5, pp. 978-1011.
6 BROWN, M.: Gypsies and OtherBohemians. The Myth of the Artist
inNineteenth-CenturyFrance. Ann Arbor (MI) 1985; GLUCK,M.:
PopularBohemia. Modernisai and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century
Paris. Cambridge (MA) 2005; MOUSSA 2008 (see in note 1).

the Gypsy nomadic life, the naming error, which
identified the Gypsies with the inhabitants of the
territory of Bohemia, begs further questions about
both the metaphorical and the real geography of
bohemianism. It suggests an inquiry into the latent
Central/Eastern European connotations of Parisian
bohemianism, which are inherent in the association
of the cradle of bohemianism with Bohemia, the
exotic and remote land on the margins of Europe,
inhabited by strangers. Seen in this light, the bohe-
mian myth lends itself to further investigation as a
very spécifie manifestation of Orientalism (the issue
addressed in Marc Smith’s text below), the one which
— analogous to Primitivism — is propelled by desire
rather than disgust, and which, accordingly, appropri-
âtes the constructed markers of cultural alterity as
the imagined subject position for the new rebellions
Self. Inevitably, the arbitrary appropriation of the
term “Bohemian” is followed by its transcription
into “bohemian”, which transposes the geographi-
cal identity with a socio-cultural one, attributed to
Gypsies and vagabonds, thus displacing the territory
with the nomadic body and relocating both of them
to Paris. But even if the “original” (albeit erroneous)
spatial identification of the signifier “Bohemian” has
been rendered invisible in the process, with the new
breed of bohemian vagabonds now firmly settled
in Paris, did such a linguistic shift hâve any bearing
on the cultural associations of the historical and
geographical term “Bohemia”, which was ušed con-
temporaneously throughout the nineteenth Century?
Was the historical Bohemia, incorporated into the
Austrian Habsburg Empire, and deprived of political
sovereignty, in any way implicated, affected, or influ-
7 WILSON, E.: Bohemians. The Glamorous Outcasts. London
-New York 2000.
8 SELL, M.: Bohemianism, the Cultural Turn of the Avant-
-Garde, and Forgetting the Roma. In: TDR, 51, 2007, No.
2, pp. 41-59; HUREVITZ, D.: Bohemian Los Angeles and the
Making of Modem Politics. Berkeley - Los Angeles — London
2008. On bohemianism and xenophobia, see also McWIL-
LIAM, N.: Avant-Garde Anti-Modernism: Caricature and
Cabaret Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Montmartre. In: LE MEN,
S. (ed.): L’art de la caricature. Paris 2011, pp. 251-261. See also
the catalogue of the recent exhibition at the Grand Palais
— AMIC, S. (ed.): Bohèmes. De Léonard da Vinci à Picasso. Paris
2012.

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