Art: The Stab of Truth

Two men of hammered bronze stand talking to each other, their arms poised in a way so questioning that one can almost hear their dialogue: “Where do we go from here?” “How the devil should I know?” In another part of the room, a marvelously attenuated adolescent boy clutches a four-leaf clover and gazes imploringly at the ceiling; he is called The Wish. The pieces are both funny and sad, a bit crude and yet full of vitality. On view at Manhattan’s Graham Gallery, they are the work of the Czech-born sculptor Ludvik Durchanek: a rough-hewn talent of considerable versatility and force.

In his 60 years, Durchanek has been a maker of frames, a therapist in a mental hospital, and a landscape gardener. From the hospital he learned the dark side of life, which finds expression in sculptures of bitterness and anger, of delicate poignancy, and occasionally of acid satire.

From gardening he got a feeling for form.

Originally he had intended to be a painter, but color did not particularly interest him, and he found that however he painted a canvas, the canvas remained for him two-dimensional. “Painting wasn’t tangible enough for me,” he says. “I have to have something, like a child, that I can feel.” When he first turned to sculpture, he worked in wood; it was not until he was past 50 that he found the materials that he now prefers—sheets of copper, bronze or silver, which he bends, hammers and brazes to enclose his forms. His skill is impressive, but even more so is the splendid chaos of his ideas, a mixture of corn and stabbing truth that often is close to surrealism. He has done a beautiful silver sculpture of an old lady’s hand, which he placed in a fading plush box and gave the title Tradition. There is a dumpy dwarf called Uncle Sam, and an extraordinarily graceful Man with a Kite. Durchanek has also done a robust George Washington, who gazes in bewilderment at a large falcon chained to his wrist. This, he explains, is the way Washington might react if he came back to America today. “I wonder what he would say. He might say, ‘My, my, what a bird you’ve got by the tail. Where are you going?’ “

The most ferocious piece in the show is a star-shaped sculpture of two winged demons riding a couple of monsters, one resembling a mad dog, the other a lunatic pig. It was inspired by a newspaper photo of a band of Southern harridans hissing and screaming epithets at Negro children entering a newly integrated school. The women were grouped in such a way as to suggest the positioning of the monsters’ heads. The emotion of the scene was transformed into an explosion of claws and hoofs, of talon-shaped fingers and screeching beaks. It is a bristle of total hate. Durchanek calls it Mardi Gras.