Ambivalences this vida Bohemia

Research shows the dilemma of 19th century artists and writers in search of artistic autonomy

Ambivalences this vida Bohemia

Research shows the dilemma of 19th century artists and writers in search of artistic autonomy

A love of art and an adventurous life are some of the most well-known characteristics of the bohemian lifestyle, which has endured to this day. However, representations of bohemia have never been free from tension. In the 19th century, artists and writers identified as bohemians, while trying to create innovations that escaped the dictates of institutions, were also confronted with the need to sell their works and enter the market. In a thesis defended at the Institute of Language Studies (IEL), Thaís Soranzo analyzes, in the contexts of Brazil, France and England, how writers and painters tried to achieve artistic autonomy amidst the debates surrounding naturalism and impressionism and, at the same time, faced problems such as the search for social prestige and money.

Impressionism and naturalism, movements that emerged in the mid-19th century, originated in France. The Impressionists sought to abolish aesthetic conventions and break with academic norms and realism, which aimed to accurately portray reality. The leading figures of this movement include Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, names that are now recognized worldwide, but who, at the time when they were proposing their innovations, were rejected. “The works of these artists now cost millions of reais, but when they first appeared, they were the target of total derision. The research, therefore, attempts to recover this first reception experienced by the Impressionists”, says Soranzo.

Naturalists were concerned with directing art to portray everyday reality. The writer Émile Zola, considered one of the founders of this movement, had a great impact in Brazil. “Zola, the great precursor of naturalism in literature, defended the project of making art focus on a more ordinary reality. With this, we began to witness simultaneously in literature and painting the interest in figures until then considered unworthy of being portrayed in art, such as washerwomen, waitresses, prostitutes, and dressmakers.”

Impressionism and naturalism, explains the author of the thesis, were sometimes confused, since the artists were constantly concerned with portraying the daily life of the metropolis and the urban rhythm of the turn of the 19th century to the 20th century. Both movements also aimed at the search for the autonomy of art, an ideal that, according to Soranzo, is expressed in the novels of the authors analyzed in the thesis: Gonzaga Duque, Brazilian, Zola, French, and George Moore, British. 

Prestige and money

For this avant-garde, identification with a bohemian life was related to distancing oneself from rigid official art institutions. However, the movement through cafés and studios and the creation of independent art circuits clashed with the need to earn money and recognition. 

“The notion of bohemia is somewhat problematic because these writers and artists, in general, were trying to break away from the system and create another artistic movement, but there were obstacles that made this freedom difficult. Therefore, bohemia presents itself as this space of tension in which the effort to fit into the market and certain social circles prevails,” explains the researcher.

“They wanted to establish an autonomous territory, with a bohemian way of life, which is different from the bourgeois way of life, but they needed to enter the market, they needed someone to buy their paintings,” summarizes the thesis advisor, Professor Jefferson Cano. 
One of the strategies they created that exemplified this ambiguity was the way they painted each other. Manet, for example, painted a portrait of Zola. “He [Zola] is portrayed in a sober manner, as an austere intellectual. Manet, aware that his name was associated with Zola, painted a portrait that indicated something like: 'See how my spokesman in the press, my literary friend, is a serious, respected artist'. So we realize that they also tried to create an image that was somewhat dissociated from the bohemian imaginary.”

These representations, says the author of the thesis, show artists concerned with the effort to present themselves as renowned, despite the contempt coming from official art institutions.

The press

The press also represented a space that artists and writers used for this purpose, since at the time it served as the main vehicle for the circulation of ideas. In addition, the press offered many writers a means of survival. “The three authors studied in the thesis were journalists who worked as art critics and who needed the press as a source of income. But they also used the press to promote a new artistic object, a new form of aesthetic representation, using this space to challenge the traditional place of art. By promoting impressionism and naturalism, they not only ensured their livelihood but also promoted their own name,” explains Soranzo.

These voices, when promoting modern art, opposed texts that portrayed impressionism and naturalism from a scandalous perspective, as exemplified in excerpts from the thesis:

“I do not want schoolwork made according to models provided by teachers. […] I do not want returns to the past, supposed resurrections, pictures painted according to an ideal formed from fragments of ideals gathered from all ages. I do not want anything that is not absolutely life, temperament, reality!” (Emile Zola);

“I know that academics and merchants are in favor of prostituting art. The fact that some young men take up painting for the mere love of it is repulsive to every judicious philistine.” (George Moore);

“Our Academy’s protection of artists who have only one quality – that of having wealthy godfathers – has ruined more than one talented artist, throwing them into discouraging obscurantism, making them mediocre portraitists in the cramped city in which they live.” (Gonzaga Duke).

The three writers also reflect on the ideal of art in their own novels. Elucidating the exchange of ideas that occurred between the three countries, Soranzo shows how Zola, Moore and Duque innovate aesthetically by making the “tension between the work and the artistic experience a literary problem”.

According to Cano, “[the thesis] manages to show how relationships between artists and appropriations take place outside the Parisian border, as well as how this ideal of autonomy is re-elaborated.”