Sociability in the Metropole: Modernism’s Bohemian Salons

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Many of the early twentieth-century sociologists who mapped out the social effects of modernity wrote of the social alienation produced by economic regimes of specialization. Among these, Georg Simmel also had much to say about sociability, which, in his view, operated as a palliative against modern entropy. In some sense the proliferation of modernist sites of sociability in these years not only attests to Simmel’s insights but also marks an emergent formal aesthetic response to modernity. The Bohemian salon instances an especially complex site of modern sociability. This article sketches the confluent histories of Bohemia, modernist sociability, and Roma culture in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Britain in order to argue that the dissident salons associated with modernism staged a formal Simmelian sociability that became a vehicle for the circulation of experimental aesthetics.