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

I should have started with it, that it is Baron László Mednyánszky. He could any moment become a member of the national casino! - But he is a painter! A vagrant person who is restlessly wandering from one place to the other, and when in some area, in a remote country, under the foreign sun among adventurous people the pain of his soul wants to sing a poem, then he will sit down and - paint a landscape. It is possible that he can sell it and then he will buy a new coat for himself, what he will give as a present to the first person in rags whom he meets on his way.’

First he exhibited his so called ‘vagrant paintings’ abroad. Mednyánszky had his only ‘real’ solo exhibition at the Galerie Georges Petit in the centre of Paris from 20th April to 2nd May, 1897, where besides his 60 paintings 27 works of Count József Somssich,

Vázlatkönyvi rajz - Katonák (1914-1916, kát. 27.) Sketch-book drawing - Soldiers (1914-1916, cat. 27)

who was 12 years younger than Mednyánszky, were also exhibited. Adrien Remacle, a leading art critic of the era in Paris, wrote the following in the foreword of the exhibition catalogue: ‘We can realise - after catching the painter - that he finds pleasure in showing us these pale young creatures with red eyes and noses, thin, sharp features, wilful mouths, who look at life under the peak of their cap with their eyes looking ahead, where the people eat and drink, but it means the painful hours of the nights spent in misery of the outer boulevards, while they melt into the gloomy darkness of their surrounding with their grey, ragged clothes. ’ However, in Hungary, sometimes there were quite rude reactions, e.g. on the occasion of the Winter Exhibition 1900-1901: ‘Finishing with the people, let us visit the monsters of the exhibition. Right in the first room the disgusting faces of two terrible human- animals gaze at us. These are <The Vagrants> of Baron László Mednyánszky. We should not doubt that these vagrants are really vagrants, we should rather doubt for a minute that these monsters are really people, or they are rather the mixtures of a frog and an orang-utan. Their type is terrible and disgusting. If the artist wanted it, he could achieve his aim, but an artist, who is such a great poet like László Mednyánszky, cannot have the aim to raise disgust with his works. Anything what is disgusting is not artistic and in old days Mednyánszky would have been burnt together with his brush and vagrants at the stake if he had offended against aesthetics like this.’ Nevertheless to be cynical the accusation of the critic in spite of his purpose contains a part of the truth which helps the interpretation, since Mednyánszky noted for himself the following in 1897-98: ‘I have realised today that I must see the people similarly to the animals, like Nyuli, if l want to have sympathy towards them.’ ‘In order to find what is important in a head, i.e. the spirit, first of all we must find the different basic parts. The suitable animal under the outside figure. After this we have to find out what would be the expression of this head at the possibly highest degree of the spiritual emotion.’ At our exhibition e.g. The Two Heads (around 1900, cat. 92) and Two Vagrants