Master of the Game

The next step was getting into a good art school. The most prestigious art school in all of France was the ecole des Beaux-Arts of Paris. Its standards were high, and few Americans were admitted. Tony applied for a place there. They’ll never accept me, he thought. But if they do! Somehow, he had to show his mother he had made the right decision. He submitted three of his paintings and waited four weeks to hear whether he had been accepted. At the end of the fourth week, his concierge handed him a letter from the school. He was to report the following Monday.

The ecole des Beaux-Arts was a large stone building, two stories high, with a dozen classrooms filled with students. Tony reported to the head of the school, Maitre Gessand, a towering, bitter-looking man with no neck and the thinnest lips Tony had ever seen.

"Your paintings are amateurish," he told Tony. "But they show promise. Our committee selected you more for what was not in the paintings than for what was in them. Do you understand?"

"Not exactly, maitre."

"You will, in time. I am assigning you to Maitre Cantal. He will be your teacher for the next five years – if you last that long."

I’ll last that long, Tony promised himself.

Maitre Cantal was a very short man, with a totally bald head which he covered with a purple beret. He had dark-brown eyes, a large, bulbous nose and lips like sausages. He greeted Tony with, "Americans are dilettantes, barbarians. Why are you here?"

"To learn, maitre."

Maitre Cantal grunted.

There were twenty-five pupils in the class, most of them French. Easels had been set up around the room, and Tony selected one near the window that overlooked a workingman’s bistro. Scattered around the room were plaster casts of various parts of the human anatomy taken from Greek statues. Tony looked around for the model. He could see no one.

"You will begin," Maitre Cantal told the class.

"Excuse me," Tony said. "I – I didn’t bring my paints with me."

"You will not need paints. You will spend the first year learning to draw properly."

The maitre pointed to the Greek statuary. "You will draw those. If it seems too simple for you, let me warn you: Before the year is over, more than half of you will be eliminated." He warmed to his speech. "You will spend the first year learning anatomy. The second year – for those of you who pass the course – you will draw from live models, working with oils. The third year – and I assure you there will be fewer of you – you will paint with me, in my style, greatly improving on it, naturally. In the fourth and fifth years, you will find your own style, your own voice. Now let us get to work."

The class went to work.

The maitre went around the room, stopping at each easel to make criticisms or comments. When he came to the drawing Tony was working on, he said curtly, "No! That will not do. What I see is the outside of an arm. I want to see the inside. Muscles, bones, ligaments. I want to know there is blood flowing underneath. Do you know how to do that?"

"Yes, maitre. You think it, see it, feel it, and then you draw it."

When Tony was not in class, he was usually in his apartment sketching. He could have painted from dawn to dawn. Painting gave him a sense of freedom he had never known before. The simple act of sitting in front of an easel with a paintbrush in his hand made him feel godlike. He could create whole worlds with one hand. He could make a tree, a flower, a human, a universe. It was a heady experience. He had been born for this. When he was not painting, he was out on the streets of Paris exploring the fabulous city. Now it was his city, the place where his art was being born. There were two Parises, divided by the Seine into the Left Bank and the Right Bank, and they were worlds apart. The Right Bank was for the wealthy, the established. The Left Bank belonged to the students, the artists, the struggling. It was Montparnasse and the Boulevard Raspail and Saint-Germain-des-Pres. It was the Cafe Flore and Henry Miller and Elliot Paul. For Tony, it was home. He would sit for hours at the Boule Blanche or La Coupole with fellow students, discussing their arcane world.

"I understand the art director of the Guggenheim Museum is in Paris, buying up everything in sight."

"Tell him to wait for me!"

They all read the same magazines and shared them because they were expensive: Studio and Cahiers d’Art, Formes et Cou-leurs and Gazette des Beaux-Arts.

Tony had learned French at Le Rosey, and he found it easy to make friends with the other students in his class, for they all shared a common passion. They had no idea who Tony’s family was, and they accepted him as one of them. Poor and struggling artists gathered at Cafe Flore and Les Deux Magots on Boulevard Saint-Germain, and ate at Le Pot d’Etian on the Rue des Canettes or at the Rue de l’Universite. None of the others had ever seen the inside of Lasserre or Maxim’s.

In 1946, giants were practicing their art in Paris. From time to time, Tony caught glimpses of Pablo Picasso, and one day Tony and a friend saw Marc Chagall, a large, flamboyant man in his fifties, with a wild mop of hair just beginning to turn gray. Chagall was seated at a table across the cafe, in earnest conversation with a group of people.

"We’re lucky to see him," Tony’s friend whispered. "He comes to Paris very seldom. His home is at Vence, near the Mediterranean coast."

There was Max Ernst sipping an aperitif at a sidewalk cafe, and the great Alberto Giacometti walking down the Rue de Ri-voli, looking like one of his own sculptures, tall and thin and gnarled. Tony was surprised to note he was clubfooted. Tony met Hans Belmer, who was making a name for himself with erotic paintings of young girls turning into dismembered dolls. But perhaps Tony’s most exciting moment came when he was introduced to Braque. The artist was cordial, but Tony was tongue-tied.