More widely recognized for his achievements as a modernist sculptor* during the final two decades of his career, Ludvik “Louis” Durchanek first studied art in the late 1920s. Born of Czech parents in Vienna, he studied horticulture at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, England (as well as in Moravia, Belgium and France) prior to his emigration to the United States in 1927.  Durchanek took courses with Umberto Romano at the Worcester Art Museum from 1936 and with Jon Corbino at the Art Students League in New York (1940-41).  

     Horseshoes on Uxbridge Common is a rare example of Durchanek’s earliest work, likely painted while he was employed as head gardener on an estate in North Uxbridge, Massachusetts (seventeen miles southeast of Worcester) and under the tutelage of Romano.  Adopting the Regionalist aesthetic taught by Romano (see Katharine (Portrait of Katharine Bigelow Higgins)), Durchanek achieved the remarkable feat of compressing twenty-five figures, a dog, a war memorial and plenty of real estate into a single picture without a sense of imbalance or congestion. The artist arranged the many elements of the composition into three concentric circles: the foreground figures, an arc of trees, and the surrounding buildings which are rendered in similar colors even though, in reality, they range from red brick to white clapboard (see Figs. 1 and 2). The open space in the foreground draws the viewer into the immediate circle of figures, while the receding perspective of the buildings ushers us all the way through to the quaint residence in the distant background. A visit to present-day Uxbridge Common reveals (in addition to the changes wrought by time) that Durchanek took liberties with his subject, skewing the perspective (as if through a fish eye lens) so as to incorporate buildings (such as the First Evangelical Congregational Church on the left) that would naturally fall beyond the edges of the canvas.  In a manner reminiscent of the work in this collection by Daniel R. Celentano, the artist has succeeded in rendering a carefree portrait of the life of a rural community four years before the tranquility would be broken by the onset of another world war.

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* Durchanek's sculptural works are represented in institutional collections including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.