MYTH OF BOHEMIANISM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY WARSAW

The text looks at the origins of the modern art world in the mid-nineteenth-century Warsaw which remained in the grip of persecution by the Tsarist apparatus. It compares the two artistic communities, which were dubbed as bohemian by their later critics: the coterie of radical poets of the early 1840s and the group of visual artists active during the 1850s. The first was identified through its eccentric behaviour and dress, as well as its provocative actions in the streets of Warsaw. The second group was constructing their collective identity by means of informal sketches, preserved in seven albums by their patron Marcin Olszyński. Examining the collection of drawings, caricatures and photographs, the text argues that those informal sketches provide a unique insight into the ways in which the artists sought to establish their new professional identity, stressing their distinctiveness from other social groups, at the time of the major socio-cultural transition from noble to bourgeois patronage, and during the formation period of Warsaw’s urban intelligentsia.