OUT OF THE NIGHT

A GREAT part of modern life is lived by artificial light, and yet no major painter has devoted himself to this glittering and multi-hued area until now. This week Manhattan's Babcock Galleries put on show the work of Chicago's Richard Florsheim, the first artist to attempt an all-out embrace of the world of electrical, chemical and neon fires. With painters everywhere attempting to reestablish contact, however ephemeral, with nature, Florsheim points out that man-made lights are also part of nature. The nighttime view from an airplane or a train can take one's breath away, and add new dimensions to the ordinary conception of what is beautiful.

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.

In the 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. "I don't think most artists go through a blinding transformation; it's like a shingled roof with no start and no finish," he explains. "But I've gone farther in the past few years when it comes to communicating what is going on around us. The artist is an interpreter after all; he's building the culture just as other people build buildings. He's communicating emotion--half of which is supplied, naturally, by the viewer."

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.

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