Landschaft mit Blumen

When Zoltán Palugyay painted this in 1930, modern art was still finding its way into Slovakia, and he had gone looking for it abroad. He studied in Budapest, Kraków, Munich and Paris, and came home carrying the colour and mood of painters like Munch and Gauguin. You can see it here in the way the flowers and hills are simplified into flat shapes and heightened colour, less a record of a real meadow than a feeling drawn out of one. This canvas set the pattern for a whole series he made through the early 1930s, his most productive years. He was 32 when he painted it, and he had only five more years to live.