Walking into a restaurant with the expectation of a great dining experience is commonplace. However, in the Hotel Lomnica, apart from culinary art, you will be delighted to see the original work of Ladislav Medňanský, a Hungarian painter of European importance, who even had his studio in Montmartre in Paris for some time.
Ladislav Medňanský could be said to be one of the most remarkable Hungarian artists of his time, and in our restaurant you can admire a unique collection of his paintings. Virtuoso landscapes from his various periods of development are represented here, as well as portraits.
Baron Ladislav Medňanský or László Mednyánszky, full name Ladislaus Josephus Balthasar Eustachius Mednyánszky, was born in 1852 in Beckov near Trenčín, but grew up in the nearby family manor house in Strážky. Here he received his first artistic education from the Viennese artist Thomas Ender. After graduating from high school, he went to Munich to study and then transferred to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He was strongly influenced by the French intimate landscape paintings of the Barbizon area and the Munich luminism, which he transformed into his own artistic expression. He was cosmopolitan, living alternately in Budapest, Paris and Vienna. He travelled to Italy and spoke several languages. However, he constantly returned to his family seat under the Tatra Mountains, to Strážok, where he had his only permanent studio.
During his first study stay in Munich and then in France (1870s), Ladislav Medňanský was strongly drawn to the legacy of the Barbizon school of plein-air painting in its immediate contact with the landscape, but he was also strongly influenced by the lesson of luminism, i.e. an extraordinary pictorial sensitivity to light and its depiction at different times of the day or year. The visitor will surely be struck by the dimensions of the not very large work "Dark Night by the Water", which in both of these contexts has, so to speak, a liminal form. Light, as a key phenomenon of painting before the birth of Impressionism, almost disappears and the chosen colour palette evokes a baroque twilight, better known from period portraits but very rare in landscape painting. We can only imagine what thoughts and moods, what intimate inner dramas led Ladislav Medňanský to this gloomy expression.
A plenary work par excellence! is Blue landscape, an endless marshy plain with a very low perched horizon and a huge mass of sky above the "flat" edge. Such a composition is very demanding to rework, especially the large expanse of sky, where Medňanský shows considerable mastery in his sensitive reworking. The unusually over-lit colouring with impressive expression makes this work all the more interesting.
Ladislav Medňanský was known and recognized as a painter of gloomy moods, melancholy, fatal passion and human isolation. The rich collection of plein-air landscape paintings that dominates his work is complemented by figurative works. Throughout his artistic genesis, portrait studies of gypsies, stumpers, vagabonds, social outcasts, men stressed on the cross of passion and fate were created. Medňanský was a brilliant draughtsman with an exceptional talent for observation - especially of form, eye expression, psychology or a character trait. From the typology of his models (or model), it is evident that he favoured figures and faces that display a kind of fierceness, a passion marked by the shadow of fatality, which mirror the anxiety and fear of an entire fin de siécle artistic generation. He even kept notes in his diaries about the interesting characters of the people he met.
Come and see for yourself their thoughtful faces.
