Budapest’s Museum of Fine Arts has opened the first large-scale exhibition in Hungary devoted to Paul Gauguin, a show the museum says draws on nearly 40 public and private collections and runs until 28 February 2027.
“Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin! The Circles of Post-Impressionists and Symbolists” opened on 30 October and fills the ground-floor temporary exhibition hall at Dózsa György út 41, on Heroes’ Square (Hősök tere).
What is in the show
The exhibition brings together around 150 works, about 80 of them by Gauguin, according to The Art Newspaper, which reports that the show’s total insurance value is 1.5 billion euros. Hungary Today and Time Out give the same counts, and the museum’s curator, Judit Geskó, has said 32 of the Gauguin works come from the museum’s own collection – two paintings, two monotypes and 28 prints.
Gauguin hangs beside his predecessors and contemporaries, among them Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Émile Bernard, Paul Sérusier, Jens Ferdinand Willumsen and the Hungarian painter József Rippl-Rónai. The museum says the exhibition follows his progress from Paris, the Île-de-France, Brittany and Arles to Martinique in the Caribbean and then to Tahiti and the Marquesas, and is arranged in 15 major and nine smaller sections.
A centrepiece is the Montpellier connection. The Art Newspaper reports that the show’s title comes from Gauguin’s painting “Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin” (late 1889), made after his trip with Van Gogh to see the Musée Fabre’s collection – including Gustave Courbet’s “Bonjour Monsieur Courbet” (1854). The Budapest hang stages the two canvases together, with the Gauguin on loan from the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
The museum presents the exhibition as the culmination of more than two decades of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist shows that have included “Van Gogh in Budapest”, “Cézanne and the Past” and a Renoir exhibition. The Art Newspaper reports the museum estimates the Gauguin show could attract up to 350,000 visitors.
Visiting
The exhibition runs 30 October 2026 to 28 February 2027. The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00-18:00, with last entry at 17:00, and closed on Mondays. Tickets cost 6,800 forints on weekdays and 7,800 at weekends, or 3,400 and 3,900 for those who qualify for the discount; between 28 and 31 December the weekend price applies every day. The museum lists the exhibition as taking about 1.5 hours.
The M1 metro stops at Hősök tere, a minute or two from the entrance, and several buses and trolleybuses also serve the square.
One practical note: on the second Friday of the month the museum opens later. That includes 13 November and 11 December, when it runs 12:00-20:00 with entry until 19:00, which makes the show an evening option as well as a daytime one.
Why it matters
For a winter city break, the Gauguin exhibition is the season’s main cultural draw in Budapest: a first-of-its-kind loan show for Hungary in a medium-sized European capital, in a building that already holds one of the region’s strongest old-master collections. It sits on Heroes’ Square, at the edge of City Park, a short walk from Andrássy Avenue and the Széchenyi baths – so it slots easily into a half-day of sightseeing.
Sources: Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest; The Art Newspaper (6 November 2026); Hungary Today; XpatLoop; Time Out Budapest; Enfilade.
Image: Sarah Stierch, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Illustration — the Museum of Fine Arts on Heroes’ Square, Budapest.