By Gregory Clark, May 15, 1926.
Toronto has no Bohemian colony, no Montmartre1, no Greenwich Village, no Soho.
But the Bohemians are there, just the same, artists, art students, musicians, sculptors, stainers of glass, toolers of leather, batterers of brass, batikers of batik2, designers of theatres, chapels, book covers, and writers of all the unprofitable branches of literature from sonnets and one-act plays to free verse, free in both senses.
Down in the basement of the Ontario College of Art, which is back of the new art gallery in Grange park, we talked to a crowd of smocked art students whose hands were all muddy with clay which they were piling up in shapeless masses that presently would emerge as symbolic figures.
“Is there a province of Bohemia in Toronto?”
“No. There are Bohemians, but they are not organized into a colony.”
“Where do most of them live? Is there no favored district?”
“Within walking distance of the college of art. That means anywhere from the Ward to the Humber or the Beach. And wherever rooms can be got cheapest, with a north light.”
“That’s vague.”
“Several have rooms over old-fashioned stables back of old-fashioned mansions.”
“That is better.”
“Many have attic rooms, and third floor backs, and hall bedrooms.”
“Bohemianer and Bohemianer!”
“Some move once a month or as often as the rent is due.”
“And is there a Bohemian restaurant, a popular cafe?”
“No. Eating…”
This art is a strange thing. It takes hold of men and maids, a passion transcending love. A large number of the parents of the younger art students feel that their offspring are addled. Everything founded on commonsense is sacrificed. There are girls studying art in Toronto today who are living on less than two dollars a week for their food. There are young men who have recently performed the miracle of existing the full eight months of the year’s course at art school on absolutely no income. Minimum of everything – food, furniture, clothing, comforts of the most elementary sort – is the rule.
Amongst the majority of the art students those students who have well-to-do parents back of them are referred to as the “Four Hundred.”
“What,” asked Arthur Lismer, who is vice-principal of the college, of one of the students who had several terms of experience, “is the very least you can get along with as living expenses?”
“Well, you can get a perfectly good room for little as two dollars a week, though three would be a more general minimum. It isn’t much of a room, of course, but it doesn’t need be does it?”
“Food?”
“Fifty or sixty cents a day will feed you nicely, that is, buying your meals. But of course, some of the girls can do it less than that by buying the raw materials and cooking their food. Some of them don’t even buy bread, but bake their own.”
Living on Nothing a Day
“So-and-so,” said Mr. Lismer, mentioning another student, “did it on less than that.”
“Ah yes, but he restricted himself to soda biscuits and milk. And then, of course, there Whatyoucallem” (and the clay-fisted students all grinned at the mention of the name), “who subsisted on the milk he used to pinch off doorsteps in his early morning foraging expeditions. Winter was a great hardship to him, when the early morning deliveries were cut off.”
“Tell us more about him!” we begged.
“There’s little enough. He was determined to study art and he had no means whatever. The only time the police nearly got him was when he broke into a cellar to steal a lump of coal for his grate and the police were called and he hid under the coal while they prodded around the cellar.”
“Why didn’t he work to put himself through?”
“How could he work?” retorted the students scornfully. “He worked at his art in the holidays.”
Adding all the conservatories of music, the art schools and other sources of instruction in the high arts, there are several hundred students of these what you might call unprofitable professions in Toronto, and a decided majority of them are the type who are smitten with that mysterious quest of an unnamable goal and who have back of them little or no financial support.
“A father,” said one girl student, “will help his son get an education to be a lawyer or engineer. But few fathers, other than wealthy and careless ones, will encourage their children in what they regard to be so crazy-headed and unprofitable an enterprise as art. Most of our relations are strained as a matter of fact.”
These students, whose Bohemianism is largely a blossom of youth, nevertheless swell the ranks of the graduate Bohemians of which Toronto is gradually collecting its quota.
“If a census were taken,” says Arthur Lismer, “of all the people who, in the secrecy of their rooms, are either painting pictures, designing in one of the crafts, writing poems or plays, or in some field of art seeking to express the mystery that is pressing from within, it would run into hundreds and hundreds.”
Few of the art students know what their goal is. They are making definite and practical sacrifices. They are living sparely, with conscious effort at economy. But few of them have any expectation of making even a moderate fortune out of their art. The student of engineering can suffer hardship with the vision before him of great rewards. But there are no examples of rich rewards in the arts around Toronto.
We asked about this from a group of students at the college.
“What do you expect to get out of it all?”
“It is hard to put a name to it. We are not at all painfully aware of restrictions or hardships of any sort. Sacrifice is part and parcel of the whole thing. You can’t imagine a fat and comfortable art student really getting ahead with his art.”
“And then,” put in another girl student in the group, “we have fun.”
Toronto’s Little Bohemian Club
They have fun. The art students’ ball last month was one of the most picturesque events of the social season. Masquerade, of the period of the Italian renaissance, original presentation of dramatic masque of Dante, directed by Roy Mitchell, and then the fox trot to one of the city’s smart orchestras on, on into morn, in costumes antedating the minuet by centuries. And the students were outnumbered, five to one, by Bohemians of all ages, from University professors to the pretty partners of bond salesmen whose experience of the plastic arts is lipstick – the partners, not the bond salesmen.
The college is open at nights. Where night classes are not going on, the students are free to work and to foregather. The Ontario College of Art is entirely co-educational. There is no segregating of sexes. And that is a very odd thing. Because the art school in Montreal, that city which is boasted to be so much freer in spirit than Toronto, segregates the men from the girls not merely in different wings of the school, but has different times of admitting and dismissing the two sexes – the men at 9 o’clock and the girls at 9.15 in the morning, and the same in the afternoon.
There are a number of little clubs of a Bohemian aspect in the city, the most active of which is the Theatre Arts Club, which actually puts on plays. These young people have their club in a quaint old building next door to the morgue on Lombard street, which formerly was a Catholic boys’ home. Some of the old churchy benches remain, and here they have erected a stage and prepared such properties as they can make with their own wits and hands entirely.
One thing about all the Bohemians, especially the younger students and practitioners of the arts, is that they want something else in their atmosphere besides air. There is an obvious approach, with self-conscious bravado, to those subjects which from time immemorial, but particularly within modern times, have belonged strictly to the arts. The Theatre Arts Club’s latest presentation, for example, was Oscar Wilde’s “Salome.” Who amongst us does not remember having quivered all over to the luscious music of this brilliant steal from the Song of Solomon in our undergraduate days?
Atmosphere is Bohemia. It appears to be a fact that unlike cows, fat and contented artists seldom produce anything worth while. The bare and limited life that results in all the compromises and makeshifts that comfortable people call Bohemia is somehow stimulating to the spirit. It is as if the restriction of all human desires such as the desire for comfort and food and property and everything else average people desire were a means of conserving a spiritual fuel for the fires that create.
There is, however, the story of a girl who came to the collage from a mansion on the Hill – the sort of girl who showed no promise of anything, not even beauty, couldn’t play, couldn’t sing, cook, fish, garden, play golf. But in her was a queer streak which her family, utterly baffled, as the famille of artists often are, diagnosed rather fearfully as art. So they sent her in all the trappings of one of the negligible “Four Hundred,” to the college. In a few months, the whole thing had captured her, body and soul.
Not Many Have Arty Look
And right before all eyes there went on the astonishing process of this girl denuding herself of all the comforts her family had accustomed her to, reducing her needs, unconsciously, almost, to a minimum, sacrificing, glorying in being admitted into the sacrificial intimacy of the hardest working students, reducing her life to the bare terms, as far as material things were concerned, in which the spirit can live in understanding with the unnamable mystery of art and creation.
That is all Bohemia is – an atmosphere, artificial, as art is artificial, in which there is subjugation of a lot of desires to spare fuel for the big desire and to free the vision far enough away to get the perspective of truth that artists must have to make art. Perhaps those who are nearest God’s image, of all mankind, are artists, who have inherited from on high a little more than others the passion to create. And it, naturally, is a mystery, from within and without.
Our Bohemians are not the least eccentric in their clothing. The reason is – no colony. If they could live and dine together they would wear their badge with pride. Amongst the elder members of the artistic cult are few even with odd haircuts. Look at the group of seven! They look more like a staff of schoolmasters than like the popular conception of artists. The only one who wears a fancy coiffure says he does it to spare himself being mistaken in railway smokers for a traveling man. It spares him a lot of conversation of that sort. Roy Mitchell, head of the stagecraft department of the college, has always had an arty look, even back before he wore the mackintosh cape, and that was about the time Red Dixon used to play fullback. An artist gets the same internal kick out of certain externals that a soldier gets out of his uniform or a golfer out of his plus fours. But until Toronto acquires a Bohemian resort, it can look for few picturesque figures among the artists.
The musical circle of Toronto contains no outstanding salons of Bohemia. Literary groups show no tendency towards the unconventionalities of what Soho, Montmartre and Greenwich Village used to be before tea rooms invited the slummer in and the artists out. Most of the literary clubs look like church socials, and sound like them, too.
Commercial art offers a way out for those students who can no longer resist the temptation of comforts, home and wife. The others head on for the larger theatres of art, New York, London, Paris, Brussels. Toronto does not hold many of its visiting art students – and a very large number of them come from far places in Canada. One of the most promising of them all comes from British Columbia, and we visited him in his attic room, vivid with sketches on every wall, a saucepan of shaving water steaming on a gas stove, a cello in a corner, paints, fragments of art material scattered about. When he welcomed us, I noticed a cigaret butt, caught and dangling from the tail of his sweater coat.
We had called with Arthur Lismer, who wanted to consult him about another picture to add to what this student was already asked to show in the group of seven exhibition. This was a great honor – the first time a student had ever been asked to show with his masters. Immediately after greeting us, this student began hunting for his cigaret butt. While Mr. Lismer talked, the student kept prowling about the attic studio with a mystified air. He looked on table, stove, shelf, floor. He stared intently at the floor. But no cigaret butt.
“Give us that one with the children bathing in the blue water,” said Mr. Lismer.
“Well, I would,” said the student. “But it won’t fit my frame, I’ve got only the two frames, and it won’t fit.”
They argued this quaint question – show held up for the want of a frame – and then the cigaret butt fell from its hiding place on to that space of floor where the student had looked most intently.
He looked at the butt with amazement. He glanced quickly about, with the air of one on whom impa are playing tricks. There was something so innocent, so elfin, so warmly comic about that whole scene, the spirited conversation between master and student, about pictures and treasured picture frames, the cigaret butt so eagerly sought and in hiding on his cost tall, and in the mysterious restoration of it, that it stood a perfect piece of all that innocence and asceticism which is all the Bohemia Toronto has.
Editor’s Note:
- From the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th, Montmartre in Paris was where many artists lived, worked, or had studios. ↩︎
- Batik is an Indonesian technique of wax-resist dyeing applied to cloth. There was an artist inspired craze in Europe and the Americas for Batik in the early 1920s. ↩︎
Leave a Reply