'Between the Bateau-Lavoir and the Closerie des Lilas flows the Seine, and the history of modern art.' Thus begins Dan Franck's book on the bohemians who flourished when Paris was the creative capital of the world in the early 1900s. Franck's book covers the first thirty years of the twentieth century, when Montmartre and Montparnasse were filled with glorious subversives who were inventing modern art and the literary language of the century: Jarry with his owl and his revolvers, Picasso the gentle anarchist, Apollinaire the eroticist, Modigliani and his women, Max Jacob and his men, the fiery Aragon, the solitary Soutine, Man Ray, Gertrude Stein, Henri Matisse, Andre Breton and many others. They came from many different countries. They were painters, poets, sculptors, musicians, and began seminal movements such as fauvism, cubism and surrealism. For three decades they led the way in literature and painting. Their lives were as flamboyant as their work; they were hedonists, believed in free love and broke all the rules of conventional Parisian society. These men and women treated work as their life; they forever inhabited the characters they had become in legend. They were and always will be the heroes of the Bohemian period: a magnificent era whose influences and movements still reverberate at the turn of the twenty-first century.
