Becoming Bohemia
Greenwich Village, 1912–1923
New York Public Library
October 12, 2024 – February 1, 2025
Becoming Bohemia: Greenwich Village, 1912–1923 chronicles the extraordinary rise and fall of the first large-scale countercultural enclave in the United States.
During the 1910s an extraordinary gathering of artists, writers, radicals, and free spirits settled in New York’s Greenwich Village, lured there by inexpensive housing and the promise of a relaxed, permissive atmosphere in which to live and work.
Though they harbored diverse creative and personal agendas, these iconoclastic transplants shared an impulse to upend not only the established principles of their respective arts, but also the era’s social conventions and political status quo. To that end, they often advocated for a host of causes such as women’s suffrage, birth control, gender equality, labor reform, socialism, anarchism, free speech, and antimilitarism.
“The Village's bohemian scene of the 1910s and 1920s was a hotbed of aesthetic innovation and radical political activism, attracting and nurturing a who's who of cutting-edge artistic, literary, and intellectual talent,” Michael Inman, Susan Jaffe Tane Curator of Rare Books at The New York Public Library, said. “Influential in its own time, it also served as a template for future American countercultures and avant-gardes.”
Highlights from the exhibition include:
- Rare editions of influential Village-based little magazines such as Others, The Dial, The Glebe, The Little Review, The Seven Arts, The Pagan, and Rogue, among others;
- Photographs of noted Villagers by Jessie Tarbox Beals, including portraits of Merton Clivette, Romany Marie, Tiny Tim, and Bobby Edwards, as well as photographs of noted Village hangouts, including the Washington Square Bookshop, the Samovar, Polly’s restaurant, and Hotel Brevoort;
- A broadside advertising an Emma Goldman lecture on birth control held at Carnegie Hall;
- First editions of John Reed’s and Louise Bryant’s firsthand accounts of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, published respectively as Ten Days That Shook the World (1919) and Six Red Months in Russia (1918);
- First edition printings of The Provincetown Plays (1916), series I–III;
- The April 1920 issue of The Little Review that occasioned the Ulysses obscenity trial; and
- Original costume design drawings for a performance of the Greenwich Village Follies (1920).
While the Village soon developed a reputation as a bohemian utopia and epicenter of the avant-garde—a place in which one might freely discover and express oneself—its stint as a cradle of nonconformism was short-lived: the United States’s entry into the First World War, among other stressors, signaled the imminent demise of its initial age of artistic and societal rebellion.
Becoming Bohemia offers a window into a period of downtown history that had an outsized influence during its time, and whose countercultural legacy continues to be the subject of study and to shape thinkers today.
Additional highlights include:
- Works by William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, Alfred Kreymborg, Marguerite Zorach, and John Sloan, among others;
- A first edition of Des Imagistes: An Anthology (1914), published by Albert and Charles Boni;
- A photograph of the May 1913 suffrage parade in New York City, which was, in part, organized and led by several prominent Villagers;
- The program from the June 1913 Paterson Silk Strike Pageant, which was held at Madison Square Garden;
- An issue of Guido Bruno’s Bruno’s Weekly (1916s); and
- A poster advertising a 1917 bohemian costume held at Webster Hall.
Becoming Bohemia: Greenwich Village, 1912–1923 features approximately 140 works, drawn from across The New York Public Library.
NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
