Ladislav Kralj

Who was Ladislav Kralj?

Ladislav Kralj-Međimurec was a Croatian painter and engraver. In the history of Croatian painting he is best known for his landscapes of his home county, Međimurje, and Zagorje, which he created throughout his entire life. Although during his lifetime his art was little known to other artists and art critics, today it has been recognized that the works of Kralj-Međimurec represent a valuable contribution to the history of Croatian visual arts of the twentieth century.

The artist was born as Ladislav Kralj in Čakovec in 1891. He decided to take the name Međimurec as a sign of love for his native soil. Kralj-Međimurec began his artistic education at the academy in Budapest in 1910, which he was forced to abandon in 1912 because he was recruited for the army. During the First World War, he was sent to the front, where he was wounded. After his recovery at the hospital in Miskolec, he returned to Čakovec, where he met Ivan Novak, a literary writer and active local politician who helped him continue with his studies. Kralj-Međimurec finished his education at the academy in Vienna under the tutorship of Rudolf Jettmar.

In his earliest works from the early 1920s, Kralj-Međimurec rejected any type of idealization and painted his canvases using wide brushstrokes. During his studies in Vienna, he started the collection of etchings depicting his hometown Čakovec, which he finished and exhibited in 1926 at the Ulrich Gallery in Zagreb. From 1926 to 1929 he worked as an art teacher in Karlovac and Nova Gradiška, until he was offered the same position at the grammar school in Varaždin. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, he created two more collections of etchings, “Dalmacija” and “Varaždin”, and painted canvases depicting social themes, whose quality kept pace with the works of contemporary Croatian artists of critical realism.