MEDNYÁNSZKY, László

Medny�nszky focused his attention on portraying tragic events of life and poverty. He was in this respect Dostoevski’s and Gorki’s counterpart in painting. “Tramps” condenses the intellectual and pictorial value of Medny�nszky’s art. The tramp is facing us in front of a yellowish-brown background, and is turning the head slightly to the right. His dark hair is umcombed, and his mouth is open. When Medny�nszky painted this portrait, he wanted to portray mental state and fate rather than man in the traditional sense of the word. The portrait is an upsetting picture of a man condemned to suffer. The picture with the inherent artistic truth criticizes Medny�nszky’s age from a social point of view.

Medny�nszky came across the subject matter of the down-and-out, tramps, and people drifted to the outskirts of life in the 1890s. He painted his best pictures on them. The strengths of his art are in his new colours and compositions, and mostly a suggestive psychologism and character portrayal expressing exposure and manipulation as in the case of the soldier head.

His landscapes painted at the end of the last century show him as a 19th c. artist, but he gradually leaves nature for man.

Medny�nszky’s portraits show either soldiers, or people who have drifted to the outskirts of life. Due to their subject matters, portrayal and genres, they belong to his most characteristic works. “Soldier Head” shows the head of a simple person who kills on order. He does not think, he only carries out commands. Misguided and bereft of his personal freedom, he suddenly realizes that war makes no sense.

The sketch of J�n Horak shows a self-conscious and headstrong man, the hero of pubs who does not care about laws. Ters�nszky wrote much about him in his novels on the age.

Medny�nszky is one of the most interesting and puzzling characters in Hungarian painting. He cannot be placed in any of the fashionable trends of his time, nor does he belong to any particular school. He was attracted by two subjects - the cycle of nature and the world of social outcasts. “Since my very early youth, observing nature has been my main occupation, the content of my life”, he wrote in his diary. Mistry hills, lakes, moonlit forests end the endless scenery of the plain are transposed into pictures in warm greys and browns. This early painting, “Marshland”, is one of the most beautiful of his oeuvre. The dejected walking figures in the rainy landscape are surrounded by pearly shimmering wetness.

This landscape is one of the several canvases which Medny�nszky painted in the Tatra Mountains, which are the mountain range forming a natural border between present-day Slovakia and Poland, and are the highest mountain range in the Carpathian Mountains.

In his diary, Medny�nszky says the following in 1895: “Confidential and mystic features of gloomy atmospheres are elements which meet only rarely.” This particularly applies to this picture: it is confidential and mystic. Time seems to stop, everything is reserved and quiet. The unusual arrangement of the picture produces a monumental effect and takes us so close to nature that one has the impression as if one were there. This proximity is a bit threatening, but it is still attractive. Natural forces apparent in the picture and the sunshine glimmering through the fog are responsible for the mystic atmosphere. On the whole, the picture is more than a mere application of plein air methods: it is a poetic expression of a pantheist natural philosophy of a person who finds himself in nature.

When was broke out in 1914, Medny�nszky hastened to enlist in the army, but was refused admission on account of his advanced age. He then got himself sent to the front as a war correspondent artist and stayed there until the end of the war, portraying the scenes she witnessed in drawings and paintings alike. His portrayal of wounded soldiers are more sophisticated interpretations of his earlier paintings of tramps.