Bohemian thinking leads the artist to take an interest in the darkest and most primitive side of the society he lives in. This can happen as a reaction to official picturesqueness or religious sentimentalism or as a disturbing identification with the infamies of hardship and ‘degeneracy’. The case of Nonell and his portraits of beggars, cretins or, especially, Gypsy women –always different but always the same– was one of the high points of bohemian ideology.

Probably at no other time in history have artists devoted so much energy to self-portraits as in modern times. Through hairstyles or clothing exhibiting different degrees of eccentricity and soon to become commonplaces, the modern artist shows off his rebellious individualism to society, sometimes as a dandy, sometimes as a bohemian. But what is more significant in these new galleries is the profusion of portraits of figures making up the artist’s closest circles: poets and writers who, in the exercise of their new mission as art critics for periodicals and magazines, were to become an essential instrument for integrating modern art in mass society.

In many aspects, the avant-garde was a continuation of bohemia, although it can be distinguished by its critical awareness of the role of the artist in intellectual work and in the collective production of its day. In its most radical versions, it saw the artist as a producer and a leader of masses, but there were also avant-gardes whose principal concerns were limited to an internal renovation of art itself. Nevertheless, away from the main centres of the European avant-garde –Paris, Berlin, Moscow–, in cities like Barcelona, the avant-garde revealed itself in more restrained and eclectic attitudes and its radicalism was replaced by an overall aspiration for modernity.