Paul Gauguin is coming to Budapest: between October 2026 and February 2027 a fantastic exhibition will open in the City Park titled Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin: The Circle of Post-Impressionists and Symbolists. Visitors to the exhibition can follow the artist’s search for a direction, as well as the intellectual and artistic developments at the end of the 19th century that led to the foundations of modernity in art.
The exhibition to open at the Museum of Fine Arts on 30 October will showcase a total of 150 masterpieces, including 80 works by Gauguin. The exhibition Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin: The Circle of Post-Impressionists and Symbolists not only promises to be a sensation in Hungary but is anticipated as a significant show across the entire European museum scene: creating the exhibition required the cooperation of almost 40 lending institutions, such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, as well as the Tate in London and the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, among others.
Advanced tickets for the exhibition can be purchased at a discount: registering with Liget + confers a discount of 10% on the first purchase.
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), one of the most influential French masters of post-impressionism and symbolism, was born in Paris and, inspired by Camille Pissarro, committed himself to painting following a career in the navy and as a successful stockbroker. At first, he lived a comfortable middle-class life with his family and collected impressionist paintings, but gave up his job in 1883 to live exclusively from art. He soon became impoverished and estranged from his family. Cutting himself off from the bourgeois way of life, he developed his own peculiar, expressive style in Pont-Aven, in Brittany. He also nurtured a tempestuous friendship with Vincent van Gogh.
Disillusioned with civilisation, Gauguin yearned for an exotic world and thus moved first to Tahiti in 1890 and later to the Marquesas Islands to live among the indigenous people. It was here that his art, characterised by a world steeped in suppressed mysticism and expressed through planar, decorative forms and pure colours, reached its fullest expression, capturing the world of the local inhabitants. Although he struggled with illnesses, poverty and the authorities towards the end of his life, his paintings became the most valuable treasures after his death in Hiva Oa in 1903, preserved in museums and worth millions of dollars; two of them are held in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.
In addition to the works of the post-impressionist master, visitors can familiarise themselves with the art of his predecessors and contemporaries: Gustave Courbet, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh, Émile Bernard and Paul Sérusier. The exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts is the organic continuation of a series of impressionist and post-impressionist exhibitions of international renown (one dedicated to Monet, one to Van Gogh, two to Cezanne and one to Renoir) organised over more than two decades. These exhibitions presented the art of the 19th century with a modern art-historical approach and a strong scientific foundation, while remaining accessible for the wider public. The Gauguin exhibition continues this more than two-decade-long tradition of professional expertise and exhibition organisation.
The concept of the Gauguin exhibition draws on international basic research incorporating the findings of American, British, French, German and Spanish art historical and anthropological research into the individual sections of the show. The exhibition is curated by Judit Geskó, Scientific Advisor at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.
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