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 The interrelationship between environment and art can nowhere be more clearly demonstrated than in the lives and dwelling places of the Bohemian artists, les Fauves, or the "wild men," as they called themselves, who lived in Paris during the first decade of the 20th century. The Pre-Raphaelites of England created for themselves a medieval scene. The impressionists in France enjoyed suburban life and the postimpressionist adventurers fled the city to live in the provinces. The "wild men," needing the stimulation of the Latin Quarter on the Left Bank of the Seine, the more romantic, dimly lighted streets of Montparnasse, or the underworld society of Montmartre, congregated in the slums, frequented the cheap cafés, lived in garret studios, or haunted the stage and the circus.
Mürger's novel, La Vie de Bohème, popularized by the opera La Bohème, describes the life of those artists whose superior wit enabled them to live upon the foibles of the stodgy bourgeoisie while pursuing love affairs with their models or portraying their own souls. The dweller in Bohemia, a Till Eulenspiegel, alive in a world of puppets was at once mountebank and cardsharp, perhaps a satirical clown living almost at war with society. He was tolerated chiefly because almost every Parisian fancied himself a potential artist or amateur. It was perhaps as such a Bohemian that Picasso could write, "All art is a lie."
Much of this "Bohemian" art cannot be taken too seriously for either its aesthetic quality or its social value, because it has been created "tongue in cheek," as a gesture of defiance toward an unsympathetic world. The subject matter of Bohemian art, for the greater part, includes objects unassociated with charm or pleasantness. Perhaps some onions and moldy cheese, a bottle of villainous-looking wine, a cast-off shoe, or a broken chair will be arranged and so painted that, despite our natural disgust, we are inclined to admit the power of art to create an interesting effect where actually none exists. So the Fauvists sought an unattractive environment as a milieu out of which to create, in a revival of genre painting, a more significant design.
Here, first the unhappy Gauguin, then the misshapen dwarf Toulouse-Lautrec, using the techniques of the fantast Moreau, sought significance in the castoffs of society. Roualt, designing with the rich reds, purples, and greens of stained-glass windows, caught underworld characters in designs strongly reminiscent of Romanesque fresco painting. Matisse, enamored of odalisques, sketched whirling dancers and goldfish in arabesques of lines balanced by flat areas of pink, yellow, and red. Derain, who escaped at times to the country, took with him all the hard realism of a city dweller, painting with that naïveté always shown by an urban soul when visiting the barnyard.
 In the works of Derain black tree trunks, carelessly drawn without much knowledge of nature's vital lines, feather out into delicate impressionistic greens and pinks against skies of cerulean blue or flat tan fields. Utrillo, approaching his canvas like a house painter, strove to imitate the precise effects of the medieval French miniaturists. Henri Rousseau, a retired customhouse officer, likewise saw life through the less sophisticated eyes of a middle-class Parisian. In youth, during his army service, Rousseau had served under the ill-fated Maximilian in Mexico, whence he brought back a few naïve visions of tropical life.
These haunted him, until at last as a pensionnaire he could spend a leisurely old age arranging them on canvas. These jungle visions, which would delight the heart of a child, rendered with exquisite craftsmanship by a frightened city primitive, have become highly prized items in postwar collections of wealthy businessmen. A curious group of individualists were these "wild men," whose lives as painters were made possible simply because each specialized in some aspect of modern everyday life, presented in a novel mode of painting succinctly expressing its genre subject matter.
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