Gyergyádesz László, ifj.: „Csavargó”. Mednyánszky László élete és művészete (Kecskemét, 2007)

a formal shape ready to carry symbolic contents, also appeared in the context of the changing landscape or of the seasons. And Mednyánszky tried all his tools as a painter on it. The motif itself goes through unique metamorphosis, it gets bigger and finally disappears in a swampy marshland, or suddenly mountain peaks reach the sky and it takes the amorphous shape of tarns. The motif is not a motif any more but it is a type of a picture, the way of compiling the painting, a pattern of composition, which is filled with colours, lights, moods and different meanings as Mednyánszky likes it.’ The only big sized landscape in Kecskemét, which was earlier most probably wrongly called VENICE, is a variation of the above mentioned topic probably attached to a section of the day (Landscape in Sunset, around 1905 see on p. 58).

Although his father had a permanent atelier built for his son next to the farm buildings of the castle in Nagyőr around 1877, from this time on Mednyánszky was almost always on his way. Still Nagyőr was the base, especially before the death of his father in 1895 where

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he always returned from his painting wanderings. Miri, the seven years younger sister of the artist remembered his days in the atelier like this: ‘After arriving in Nagy őr he went in here and he worked here from morning till evening, always nude. Most of the time he used gipsies for this purpose; very often he worked till midnight, diligently, with endurance. Sometimes we could not see him for days; his meals had to be taken in so that he should not have to suspend his work. As soon as his nerves were tired, he went to the mountains, forests and he lived with shepherds, ate their food, climbed the mountains and painted in the open air. Sometimes after a week of this life he got home refreshed, looking good, with a pile of sketches.’ Csilla Markója mentions as a new point of view not only the Szirmay genes as the causes of his painting wanderings through all his life: ‘...the hypocrite society of the turn of the century, where homosexuality was a taboo, although it was widely spread among aristocrats and artists as well, it forced Mednyánszky to have a hiding and wandering form of life, which he could thank both his unbelievable mobility among the castes and his guilt coded with cipher. ’

Mednyánszky rented his first atelier in Vienna between 1880-1883. Here he gets further acquainted with the so called Viennese ‘mood painting’ what he had already learnt about partly in Szolnok and also from the Austrian painters (e.g. Emil Jakob Schindler, Tina Blau, Eugen Jettel, Robert Russ, Alfred Zoff, Wilhelm Bernatzik) he had met during his trips to Italy (he made several trips between 1877 and 1881 and he also had an atelier in Rome). In 1895 one of Mednyánszky’s entries into his diary also shows that the ‘Stimmung’ became an enduring element of his painting. ‘The direction of the mood, that’s what I see in everything. I am looking for it in the colour as well as in the line, the quality of the air, the odour of plants, in the languishing effect of the heat as well as in the effect of the cold.’ The technique of leaving the basis free (e.g. red wooden basis and the golden-brown laminated paper plate) can also be mentioned as their effect (possibly mostly through Jettel). From the Viennese

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