Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [31]
Day courses at the Beaux-Arts did not commence until October, so Redford and Brendlinger decided to leave town. On the advice of a German they met at a jazz club, they set off for Majorca. There, for $40, they rented a Moorish villa belonging to the Catholic Church at Can Pastilla, south of Palma. They were in sight of the sea and surrounded by white walls draped in bougainvillea. But Redford did not enjoy the blissful isolation for long. “He would sit at these open-air bistros all day long and sketch the customers,” remembers Brendlinger. “All the faces he chose were the sad ones. All of this work was very moving and evocative, and I saw a side to him that was new. This wasn’t the flake from CU. This was some troubled kid.” Brendlinger, whose father had died when he was very young, wondered if Redford wasn’t struggling with the grief of losing his mother. “I gathered she was the heart of his self-esteem. But I think it was more than that. He had a creative urge bursting to break out, and it had been suppressed. I began to understand that Europe was do or die for him, secretly.
“We got to talking about our after-college destinies, and how the business world would kill both of us. Bob talked about his love for art and wondered where art and movies might intersect. The movie industry, we decided, offered lots of perks, like travel, long resting spells between jobs, et cetera. Bob was a vain kid, but his ego wasn’t so big that he was imagining himself as an actor. I said to him: ‘What about acting?’ But he was thinking only of art. I said, ‘After this is over, we can go back to L.A. and make a great life for ourselves conning our way through the movie industry.’ He seemed amused by the thought.” But all Redford was interested in, he says, was getting to the Beaux-Arts.
In October the friends returned to Paris and took a room for $1.50 a night at the Hôtel Notre-Dame on the Quai Saint-Michel. Redford started at the Beaux-Arts. The school’s emphasis had recently shifted from painting and sculpting to architecture. For day students, the first two years were couched in classicism and Renaissance studies. Redford slumped: “This was the school where Delacroix, Ingres, Renoir, Degas and Monet trained. It was supposed to be the ultimate communal school that valued experiment. But the environment I found was academic and very self-serious. It was everything that made me uncomfortable. All I did was sit in a courtyard and learn about Alberti’s mathematical theories and the principles of aerial perspective and chiaroscuro.”
After four weeks he transferred to the recently accredited modernist Académie Charpentier. Here informality inspired Redford. “I finally started to forget academic study and experiment. It was the first time in my life that I could work in unself-conscious freedom, try things and fail or succeed, and build a portfolio. I changed fundamentally. When I first arrived in Paris I was wearing a bateau-collared shirt and beret I’d stolen from a Beverly Hills store. I was playing at being Gene Kelly in Paris. By the time I was at the academy’s little third-floor atelier, the phoniness was gone. I was painting in oils, every day. I particularly loved to paint pregnant women, for their fullness in any pose. Up till then my ambitious artwork was dark, like Franz Klein’s. Now it was full of blazing color.” Modigliani became his new, cherished template, as much for his history of wildness as for his art: Modigliani was an uninhibited, glorious drunk, indulging the most dangerous affaires, stealing stone from municipal building sites, defying everyone, a persona that felt comfortably familiar.
Brimming with new energy, Redford joined with student radicals organizing street demonstrations against