As the globetrotter and image hedonist Dominik Skutecký with his image vitality and sensuality has a solid place in the prehistory of Slovak classical art modernism, Ladislav Medňanský, the second great personality of late realism and emerging Central European impressionism, stands at the opposite pole.

As the globetrotter and image hedonist Dominik Skutecký with his image vitality and sensuality has a solid place in the prehistory of Slovak classical art modernism, Ladislav Medňanský, the second great personamity of late realism and emerging Central European impressionism, stands at the opposite pole. His life and work oscillate around several artistic centres, where he lived and worked – Munich, Vienna, Paris and Budapest. The author alternated these fated work places with his native Beckov, but mainly with the family seat in Strážky in Spiš, where today his permanent exhibition is located, within authority of the Slovak National Gallery. The importance of Ladislav Medňanský is also confirmed by the great acquisitions in the property of Gallery Lomnica in the Tatra hotel of the same name (these are deposited mainly in the Sissi Restaurant, which emphasises their Austro-Hungarian dimension).

Fans and enthusiasts of Ladislav Medňanský's artistic legacy have the opportunity to see for themselves how the experience of Munich luminism  (working with natural sources of light in the country) has had a fundamental impact on the artistic development of the restless author. Regular study stays in Barbizon,  in the region of Fontainebleau, equally intensively influenced the early years of the painter from 1875. It was where the so-called en plein air was born - painting created not in a studio, but directly in an open space and in contact with the mood and atmosphere of a natural experience. The third impulse – especially in the last decade of the 19th century and then at the beginning of the new century – was an intense contact with French impressionism (light, colour, fleeting moment, presentation).

The synthesis of these fundamental impacts shaped the artistic personality of Medňanský, who was attracted by the dreamy and elegant moods of river and marshy lands in a silver haze, mysterious forest interiors  motivated by the influence of light of different phases of the day and seasons (dawn, sunset, fog, snow). Often in this natural environment, figural staffage also appears in the form of people from the periphery, wanderers by the fire or people in a sense of isolation. With this emphasis on the landscape fragment, its mood, colour and optical impression, the painter freed landscape painting from the academic doctrine of an idealised romantic sentiment. It is not for nothing that the art historian writes about Medňany landscape painting to be a mirror of the instinctive movements of the human soul  and a search for a way out of the labyrinth of contradictory feelings of passion. The feeling of the coming end of the century and the fatefulness of what is to come cannot be better expressed.