Csilla
Markója
A
Painter Maudit
László Mednyánszky (1852 - 1919)
Due to meningitis, this prematurely-born child of an aristocratic
family with its roots in Upper Hungary, the northern Hungarian highlands,
and thus the future heir to the estate of Beczkó castle (Beckov, Slovakia),
was privately tutored. He was still a child when he was allowed to accompany
the aged Thomas Ender, a renowned water-colourist, on sketching trips to the
Nagyőr (Stráz©ky) Mountains that ringed the Mednyánszky family seat, and it
was from copying Ender's landscapes of the Tatras and plaster casts sent from
Vienna that he acquired basic artistic skills at a very early age. He was
already then breaking free from the conventions associated with his aristocratic
birth, forming his first great attachment when still an adolescent to one
of the estate's coachmen. On family advice, he began studying engineering
at the Zurich Institute of Technology in 1871, but the next year found him
at the Munich Academy as a pupil of Strehuber, the successor as director to
the celebrated Peter von Cornelius. The formal courses of the Academy bored
him, however, and he felt no better in Ludovico Seitz's private school either.
In 1873 he became the pupil of Isidore-Alexandre Augustin Pils, a painter
of historical battle scenes at the Paris Académie des Beaux Arts.
It may have been Pils who aroused Mednyánszky's interest in a subject that
was to figure in the war sketches of his later years, though in all truth
the young baron needed little encouragement for it, quite apart from his social
sensibilities, he had a natural curiosity for dramatic fates and events of
every description. He was drawn to catastrophes: whether a flood, a volcanic
eruption, an epidemic or a street disturbance, he had to be there. He recorded
every moment of his life in the Greek script of his coded handwriting in one
or another of several thousand notebooks. His restless nature drove him on
from place to place, and it was not uncommon for him to rent studios in Budapest
and Vienna simultaneously. In 1896, when Hungary was celebrating the thousandth
anniversary of the arrival of the Magyar tribes in the Carpathian basin, Mednyánszky
was roaming the streets of Parisian slums, passing himself off as a rag-picker,
at a time when his pictures were hanging in the Millennial Exhibition at Budapest.
He shared out everything he possessed, supporting numerous tramps with his
dwindling income from the Beczkó estate and the trickle of money he earned
from his work. Mednyánszky owed that extraordinary mobility between castes
and classes which was a condition of the portraits of tramps not just to his
need for independence, his legendary itinerant itch, and his critical stance
towards society but also to his homosexuality, which impelled him into a promiscuous,
highly mobile way of life that allowed him to hide himself in his vagrancy.
In his case, homosexuality was the pledge of inter-caste mobility, of the
attitude that made it possible for this scion of an aristocratic "hothouse"
upbringing to form genuine relationships with those on the margin of society,
which were not derived from vicariously experienced sentiments. He was in
no need of initiations and no longer struck a sentimental tone; his experience
of the margins, interiorized as it was, was a good deal more general than
any critique of society. He writes uninhibitedly to Dávid Klein, storeman
to his patron, the art-loving publisher, József Wolfner, who was the link
to his own class and, simultaneously, to an assured living:
I am still having a spot of bother with my accommodation:
I am unable to use the flat I have had up to now, because a sewer has gone
burst and the stench is horrendous. There is no money for a new flat, so
for the last 10 days I have been sleeping here, in the cold studio, fully
clothed, like a right and proper down-and-out; if I had a big enough mirror,
I would paint myself, no need to look for a sitter. I am beginning to find
myself good-looking.
Though meant facetiously, the communication is replete with
expressions that betray an underlying seriousness: "like a right and proper
down-and-out... I am beginning to find myself good-looking." The down-and-out
is splendid, or to be more precise, elemental; or, to be even more precise,
strong. "Anyone who wishes to be strong, let him be a medium of the strong,"
as he reformulated the Rilkean axiom of "in the proximity of a stronger existence."
Besides down-and-outs, however, "the strong" also included peasants, fishermen
and coachmen with whom Mednyánszky would have been happiest to spend his youth,
and
later indeed spent his life:
Today I painted the whole day, and in the evening I went
to Pest. I bought brushes, canvas and turpentine... I went on from there to
Pista Varga's place, in Aradi utca. In that connection, it passed through
my mind what it would have been like, when I was really young, to have had
a friendship like this and been able to make friends with lots of young
coachmen in big stables. How splendid the human and painterly aspect would
have been.
What attracted him in 'the strong' was the 'animal' essence:
"Today I noticed that I have to see people as akin to animals... if I wish to
have any sympathy towards them." A version of the same thing, as applied to
the technique of portraiture:
In order to find what is interesting in a head, the soul
that is to say, one must first search out the various fundamental parts.
The corresponding animal beneath the external form. Then one has to investigate
what the expression of that head would be at the highest possible degree
of spiritual emotion for him.
The animal in the absolute sense is, for Mednyánszky, a positive
attribute as is apparent from one of his numerous notes on the nature of melancholy:
An awareness of transience, therefore, is produced by certain
physiological effects. Without this melancholy and this awareness of transience
only purely animal moods are possible. Animal moods only produce joie de
vivre, without any thought directed to future and past, and derive totally
from consonances.
The choice of wounded figures and prisoners,
treated in the iconographic tradition of St Sebastian, appeared early as subjects
in Mednyánszky's work. Hanging in the Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava,
is a picture of two life-size prisoners, hands bound together, which Slovak
art historians date to before 1895, yet canvases depicting injured fishermen,
expiring figures and kneeling prisoners were already being produced around
1877. Prisoners, martyrs, casualties, acts of violence, lynchings and waylayings
The Murderer, c. 1911, Damjanich János Museum, Szolnok)- in short, images of
sado-masochism and violent death- were to accompany him throughout his life.
If he was looking for a magic spell, a philosopher's stone, he found it in
that: counting from the marbled rusty colours of landscapes that evoke strange,
animal innards (e.g. The Iron Gates, c. 1895, HNG), pinkish-crimson caves
(e.g. Dusk, 1898, HNG), monsters with smouldering, bestial gazes, and the
triumphant outcasts that he produced at the very end of the nineteenth century,
it took but a few years until the development of his solitary art, comparable
to no-one else's, that between 1900 and 1914 gave rise to a sequence of such
masterpieces as After a Fight (c. 1898-1900, HNG), Poveerty Stricken (c. 1905,
Kecskemét Gallery), Head in Hands (c. 1911, Kecskemét Gallery), and Head of
a Tramp (Wounded, c. 1914, HNG), or the expressionist period between 1911
and 1913, with works like A Lynching (c. 1911, Damjanich János Museum, Szolnok),
Tramps in the Night and The Tramp, which in all respects can be regarded as
the very peaks of his art.
Much the same goes for Mednyánszky's utterly idiosyncratic notions about motifs.
He thought in terms not only of sequences of images (he took, and made use
of, photographs from an early date) but also of repetition and variation of
formal motifs. One and the same motif or formal figure- like a tune or phrase
in a musical work which vanishes only to reappear as variations- would be reworked
in further pictures from time to time. Yet he went beyond even that. One can
observe the traces of a peculiar hybridising, translating technique in his
oeuvre, the full significance of which has yet to be explored and taken stock
of. The group of three figures in A Lynching is present in a quite different
context in the sketchbooks. There the aggressors become supportive: the grouping
is formally identical, with two men flanking a third, but whereas in one case
they are leading off a prisoner, in a second they are holding up an injured
man, a drunk, a cripple, and in a third persecutors tear apart a victim. That
grouping of two holding a third between them is re-encountered in 1909, and
luckily a Greek-script caption below the small sketch on the right reveals
that in this case we are dealing with a "supportive" scene: two companions
are propping up and "guiding a drunk" (Sketch for a Diary, 1909, HNG). The
small sketch on the left is the more violent. This scene, for which the caption
is no more than "at night", is now beginning to look very much like A Lynching,
that most expressionistic of Mednyánszky's pictures. The composition of the
latter is unambiguously present, only inverted, in a 1911 or 1912 sketch for
They Caught One. The motif of being found dead which featured in works of
his younger days, also crops up on the same page: the caption given to this
Pietŕ-like composition is "A wounded man found in the stable".
The posture of the principal figure, which can be traced back to a languishing
formal motif in Wounded Fisherman, turns up again in a sketch of the extraordinary
subject matter for The Stocks (1911-12, HNG). Still more extraordinarily,
the motif of the figure bending over the languishing form, who is either inspecting
the person locked in the stocks or else coming across him either wounded or
dead, is also on the same page in a 'benevolent' role as someone rousing (or
reviving) a resting (or flagging) companion. That 'wakening' theme recurs
in a number of sketches, as if the finding of a corpse were just a 'baneful
inversion' or malign subcategory of it. Likewise, the scene of propping up
a drunk shows up on the right-hand side in a motif of practically identical
form but opposite intent in what is clearly Arrest. During the First World
War, however, the same frontal grouping transforms into Old Man with Helpers.
There is no caption to give us immediate assistance here, but the tottery
posture of the central figure and the stick he is holding point unequivocally
in this direction. A more dynamic concept of this same trio grouping, given
the caption Fire-Raiser (1917, HNG), has affinities with A Lynching yet again.
The device in itself appears to have excited Mednyánszky so greatly that even
six years after A Lynching can be presumed to have been completed, now in
the midst of the war, he returned to it once again to put the three-figure
grouping into several crowd scenes. In one of these the prisoner is as yet
only an object of pursuit, but in the second the pursuers cut him limb from
limb. The odyssey taken by this motif, and its transformations on the way,
demonstrates how Mednyánszky started out with an isolated, passive figure
(St Sebastian, Prisoner) then placed it within a 'setting', a scene of action,
but envisaging that one and the same image of pathos be realised now in a
positive sense (a wounded man being succoured), now negatively (a lynching).
During the war he made the suffering individual part of a crowd scene, thereby
stripping the violent act of its individuality.
At the same time, motifs intersect and interact with one another. Such crossfertilisation
was long a fixation for Mednyánszky. As early as 1892, he felt that conventional
genres could only be salvaged through hybridisation, and in any case, not
a little influenced by his theosophical beliefs and his search for the artistic
'arcanum', he generally classed inversion as one of the higher-order procedures:
Inversions and hybridisations. This question preoccupies
me exceedingly, because one has to find a rule, a law, under which certain
things are inverted or under which certain things are cross-fertilised in
the conceptual world. The formula of higher operations.
Hybridisation, after 'baneful inversion', is one such higher
operation: crossing the three-figure grouping of A Lynching with the motif
of They Found Him Dead results in a new configuration, also known in the form
of Standing Over a Grave, a sketch made for the painting Grave in the Carpathians
(1906-10, HNG).
Mednyánszky was quite probably unique, and not just in Hungary, in his daring
handling of these inverting and hybridising motifs. Over and beyond the fact
that he created a perfect symbiosis of form and content in his use of motifs,
his recourse to inversions and hybridisations hints at, and pictorially embodies,
Heraclitus' concept that every form is merely a transient, momentary vessel
for diverse contents that may, on occasion, be diametrically opposed to one
another. Mednyánszky's sketches express nothing less than the fact that contradictory
interpretations may co-exist simultaneously for one and the same configuration;
that there is no form for which the content is not a matter of interpretation.
Moreover, just as modern (and indeed post-modern) poets invoke multiple significations
of one and the same word in their poems, Mednyánszky introduces a pictorial
syntax in which polysemy and ambiguity receive a privileged place. That is
an audacious step on which even the post-Impressionists did not dare to embark;
indeed, to raise the issue at all is, in principle, more characteristic of
modernity. Admittedly, for the time being the only evidence we have that Mednyánszky
approached what, from another perspective, might be seen as a technical issue
in such philosophical depth exists in the form of his notebooks and sketches
It is still just conceivable that finished pictures in which, on the one hand,
a surgeon dresses the wounds of an injured man seated on a chair whilst, on
the other, the same figure, now as interrogator or torturer, binds his prisoner
may yet come to light. As yet, however, we know this fresh 'baneful inversion'
only from a sketch which likewise came into being through a process of cross-fertilisation.
In the upper left-hand corner of a page in a notebook containing rescue scenes
from flood and conflagration is a tiny vignette that amalgamates the motif
of the discovery of a corpse and that of awakening, with a helping man bending
over an inert seated figure. Judging from the posture in the next incarnation,
a sketch captioned Naked in a 1917 notebook, it is probably a surgeon who
is bending over his injured patient, removing a piece of shrapnel or dressing
a wound. From the aggressive gestures of the two figures on either side of
the seated man in the 1912 sketch, by contrast, it is clear that here we are
dealing with a violent act.
This was not the first time that a torture scene had appeared
in the sketchbooks. The compulsive interest that he displayed in the nature
of human violence can be likened only to that of Goya. A lengthy passage dealing
with the theoretical aspects of sadism, which is accompanied by illustrative
drawings of torture scenes, provides an overall exposition of the artistic
reasons for that interest:
Application of this theory [i.e. the theory of sadism] to art.
These observations are very important from the standpoint of art since they
offer a clarification of the sort of emotional impact that I am in any case
often seeking to touch on in my paintings.
Through precise definition of these emotional elements it will be easier for
me to evoke pure, and thus strong and not composite, effects with my pictures.
Both the subject (the act) and the manner of the concept and its depiction
have an important role in this respect.
In any event, the highest rank is generally due to those in which the aspiration
exercises its impact in the sense of evolution, or in other words intellectuality.
The impact, however, naturally also depends just as much on the way it is
painted. From the point of view of the general art loving public, what is
most interesting these days is what aims in the horizontal direction of self-annihilation.
Especially if there is something of the sacrilegious about it. E.g. vivisection
in the presence of a sadistically roused spectator.
The carrying out of an excruciating sentence in which one of the judges shows
unmistakeable signs of sadistic and emotional arousal.
The subject has to be depicted in such a way that the mental process is made
clearly visible...
With landscapes an atmosphere in the sense outlined above may be achieved
indirectly through the physiological impact of colours, lines, forms.
With representations that aim in the horizontal and crudely sensual direction
the strictest realism is necessary, with regard to both the principal subject
and the accessories.
With representations in the ascendant or intellectual direction it is necessary
to take advantage of every artistically permitted liberty. In this case, a
lack of primitive, still-life realism is in no way disturbing; indeed, there
is a need for that freedom in order to achieve a concordant and strong impact.
These peculiar preoccupations with the nature of force and
violence were destined to achieve a vindication in the First World War, in
which the 62-year-old painter was a volunteer war artist. He visited the front
lines to make sketches of the fighting and was himself wounded. Exhaustion
and progressive illness took their toll. He died in 1919 in the penurious
surroundings of his Viennese studio. The war brought Mednyánszky's art to
a full fruition, a consummation (In Serbia, 1914, HNG; The Wounded Man, 1917,
HNG; Trench with Dead Soldiers; Modern Hungarian Gallery, Pécs; Standing in
Line, 1916, Damjanich János Museum, Szolnok). His initial enthusiasm for it
addressed a long-felt attraction, a realisation of thematic concerns that
pushed his art towards the representation of catastrophes and the at times
demonic forces that are at work in men. In his battlefield pictures the corpses
merge in morbid harmony or, one might say, sensual rapture with Nature (Decay,
c. 1917, Kecskemét Gallery).
Those sketches stand for nothing less than the idea that contradictory interpretations
may co-exist simultaneously for one and the same configuration; that there
is no form for which the content is not a question of interpretation. In advancing
this notion, Mednyánszky anticipated not only the Hungarian plein-air school
and the progressive art of the early twentieth century but also, to some extent,
modern art as we now understand it. The intention of deliberately using specific
formal motifs and configurations over and over again to produce more condensed
expressions of the interplay of energies and forces, yet without having to
renounce fidelity to reality and the landscape tradition of Barbizon in the
process, led Mednyánszky to make a number of compositional discoveries. He
learned how to paint monumentally, and through his monumental art he came
ever closer to his artistic ideal of all-embracing, sweeping, painting for
painting's sake. The first discovery that he made en route to this monumental
style was in the domain of scales and horizontal lines:
It was always one of my ideals to picture a chunk of Nature
for myself fantastically enlarged- enlarged so greatly that people are able
to stroll beneath the leaves of strawberry plants. That is how I had to
put myself again into the mood in which everything seemed so large. Displacement
of the point of view. The horizon has to be either lowered or raised higher.
In that way everything can be enlarged to a fantastic size, quite arbitrarily,
and it is strange that then we get it right, because everything that surrounds
us really is big. What is trivial and ridiculous- that is the appearance.
Every person is a miracle of grandeur.
Csilla Markója
is on the staff of the Art History Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
and is founder-editor of Enigma, a journal of art theory. She has published
widely on László Mednyánszky and nineteenth-century painting.
