Experimente und Sackgassen in Mednyánszkys Schaffen um 1890-1895

Abstract

Summary László Mednyánszky's work during his whole period of artistic activity developed, in essence, independently from the then contemporary styles and current trends. This statement, however, does not exclude the fact that his work is marked by various deflections in both his personal style and the quality of paintings, and is interwoven with several experiments. So far a relatively clear picture of Mednyánszky's work and its development has been created, especially from the perspective of his major periods; however, almost all of his artistic activity is accompanied by experiments, deflections from the stream, returns to memories and moods of previous periods. That's why Mednyánszky's entire artwork is characterized by the plurality of style and motives. Since the late 70's, we have known from the painter's own diaries that he also intensively and theoretically studied the more clearly formal problems of painting. We study the art of Mednyánszky in the first half of the 1890's from the viewpoint of these experiments: e.g. the range of problems relating to allegoric representation, where we proved that Mednyánszky did not start dealing with the themes of death and its allegoric representation in a direct relation to the illness of his father, as it has so far been stated by a number of researchers, it culminated in this time. However, a grave, a cemetery, death, illness, bad luck, a dying person, a dead child, etc. are constantly repeated motives in his artwork. We try to find examples of paintings, which could have been marked by the painter as spiritual, pictures that he might consider imaginations between unrealistic and realistic, and also to discover what the painter was referring to as “conventional realism”or “a totally free form”and so on. Mednyánszky, in the second half of the 90's, did not continue these experiments; however, he used the previously obtained experiences, consisting mostly of his awareness of a painter's freedom and the determination of possible limits of representation, as these proved most convenient for the painter. Mednyánszky certainly made experiments of this nature, and in that period of time, i.e. around 1895, he made a particularly high number of them. It is obvious, that he was looking for new manners and outlets of expression, as well as for new themes, and, in parallel with pictures created in a proven way, he discovered some possibilities that can be considered extreme in the context of his artwork. These experiments, however, definitely did not satisfy him. However, a further step in the development of his artwork came about after his third stay in France in 1896–97.