Sitting 1880

Ladislav Mednyánszky made this pastel drawing of a seated man sometime before 1919. The man is formally dressed in a dark hat and long purple gown. He sits stiffly in his chair looking out the window. Mednyánszky was a Hungarian artist who depicted the lives of marginalized people at the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Although he came from an aristocratic family, his work focused on the poor. Here, the window bars behind the man create a prison-like effect. Perhaps this image is a critique of social class? Is the sitter trapped by the rules and expectations of his social position? Or is Mednyánszky showing us the internal experience of social alienation? To understand this image, we could research the history of social class in Austria-Hungary. We could also investigate the institutional structures of art at the time and how they impacted artists like Mednyánszky.