Word: florsheim
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Articulating admirably, Marlon Brando, 38, let a Tokyo reporter for Variety in on the difficulties of marketing a Great Actor. "An actor is a product like Florsheim shoes or Ford cars," said Brando. "He's a useful product that is resold many times for social purposes; and he's exploited the way any other piece of merchandise is." All terribly crass, but something else bugged Brando even more: "As soon as you become an actor, people start asking you questions about politics, astrology, archaeology and birth control. And what's even funnier, you start giving opinions...
Born 43 years ago into a wealthy Chicago family (Thor Power Tool Co.), Florsheim was a painfully shy child, channeled all his energies into straight-A scholarship and crude, gloomy art. His father reluctantly helped him get an art education in Europe during the 1930s, but before World War II Florsheim managed to sell just one picture...
...Navy during the war, Florsheim discovered in himself an unexpected streak of scientific acumen, developed a radar plane-spotting technique that is still considered basic. But at war's end Florsheim still found himself as far as ever from solving the problems in his art. He buckled down to a back-breaking work schedule in his Chicago studio and exhibited only on occasion...
Happily married, and with an art teaching job to make ends meet, Florsheim still felt and painted misery. His black works found few buyers; he did not mind. "You wouldn't expect someone two years out of college to be made president of General Motors, because you know he wouldn't have the mature experience. Yet we expect this of painters. But it is much harder to be a good painter than president of General Motors.'' Slowly, out of the gloom in Florsheim's studio, more positive and colorful pictures began emerging...
Viewers now snap up everything he offers. The peculiar luminosity of his technique, which involves mixing the colors with wax and applying them cold with a palette knife, contributes to Florsheim's recent rise. So does his increasing ability to suggest deep spaces and complex forms without defining them. More important is the fact that his pictures bring over into the world of art a once dim and obscure night world, newly sparkling...