A sweeping retrospective of Lajos Tihanyi, a leading force in Hungarian Expressionism and the avant-garde, takes over 2 Szent György Square (Szent György tér 2) in the Castle District. Nearly two hundred works—his most important paintings and graphics alongside estate objects—chart a restless, radical career. Deaf from childhood, Tihanyi turned silence into color and form, forging a distinctive visual language without academic training. A founder of The Eight (Nyolcak), he became one of the 20th century’s most original Hungarian painters. The photo is under the copyright of the Museum of Fine Arts.
Rebel Forms, Bold Colors – Lajos Tihanyi
January 23, 2026, 16:00–17:00
Marking the 140th anniversary of Tihanyi’s birth, the exhibition spotlights key canvases, works on paper, and intimate personal items. Guided tours offer context on his audacious palette, abstracted structures, and the personal history that shaped them. From early, color-drenched experiments through Nagybánya’s nature-based lessons to the cosmopolitan currents of Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and New York, Tihanyi’s work moved fluently between expressive force, Cubist construction, and abstraction—always self-directed and enduring.
Participation requires both a temporary exhibition ticket and a guided tour program ticket priced at 1,500 HUF (about 4.20 USD). Duration: 60 minutes. Capacity: 17. Meeting point: information desk.
Further dates:
– January 29, 2026, 16:00–17:00
– January 31, 2026, 15:00–16:00
– February 7, 2026, 11:00–12:00
– February 8, 2026, 15:00–16:00
– February 11, 2026, 16:00–17:00
– February 12, 2026, 16:00–17:00
Accessible Tour with Sign Language Interpretation
January 25, 2026, 15:00–16:00
This guided tour ensures that hearing, hard-of-hearing, and deaf visitors can experience the show together with sign language interpretation. The content mirrors the standard tour, focusing on Tihanyi’s path from silence to a singular painterly voice, his self-taught breakthroughs, and his place in The Eight (Nyolcak) and Hungarian modernism. Entry requires the temporary exhibition ticket and the 1,500 HUF (about 4.20 USD) program ticket. Duration: 60 minutes. Capacity: 17. Meeting point: information desk.
Members of the National Association of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (SINOSZ) may attend free with prior registration. Deadline: January 20.
Phenomenon: This Was Lajos Tihanyi – Tour by Art Historian Blanka Bán
January 30, 2026, 16:00–17:00
Tihanyi, a cornerstone of early 20th-century Hungarian modernism and co-founder of The Eight (Nyolcak), grew up in a Budapest bourgeois milieu and, after losing his hearing young due to serious illness, carved an independent trajectory without academic schooling. His art absorbed the intellectual climates he inhabited: vivid beginnings gave way to Nagybánya’s naturalism, then to the modern scenes of Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and New York. Expression, Cubist structuring, and abstraction coexist across decades, always underwritten by autonomy and endurance.
Expect sharp questions: What did his parents envision for his adulthood? Why did he paint both sides of certain canvases? How did contemporaries describe his character, and how did he immortalize them in portraits? How did he travel from the Fauves’ electric color to nonfigurative composition?
Full-price ticket: 7,400 HUF (about 20.70 USD). Discount ticket: 4,200 HUF (about 11.75 USD). Capacity: 20. Meeting point: ground floor, exhibition entrance.
Online Guided Tour of the Tihanyi Exhibition
February 3, 2026, 19:00–20:00
Experience the anniversary exhibition from home on the Day of Hungarian Culture. After the live Zoom tour, explore the virtual space for a week: zoom in on works and delve into the gallery texts at your own pace. Participation fee: 1,500 HUF per person (about 4.20 USD). Capacity: 90. Length: 60 minutes.
Lajos Tihanyi, the Restless Charmer – Tour with Nóra Winkler and Tünde Topor
February 5, 2026, 17:00–18:00
An extraordinary life, an unconventional career, and a legacy that returned home in adventurous ways. A founder of The Eight (Nyolcak), Tihanyi painted “a whole gallery” of early 20th-century Hungarian writers and artists with piercing insight. Critics said psychological portraiture entered Hungarian painting with him, and his portraits double as studies of the psyche. He often turned the lens on himself, and his late abstract compositions are equally compelling. What do these works and the stories behind them say to us now?
Full-price ticket: 7,400 HUF (about 20.70 USD). Discount: 4,200 HUF (about 11.75 USD). Capacity: 36. Meeting point: ground floor, exhibition entrance. Tickets available online and on-site, first come, first served. After the tour, the exhibition remains open for independent viewing until 18:45.
Budapest–Berlin–Paris: Tihanyi’s Road to Abstraction – Tour by Writer and Art Historian Rita Halász
February 6, 2026, 16:00–17:00
Tracing the style of a painter born 140 years ago, this tour follows Tihanyi from turn-of-the-century café culture through the Berlin avant-garde to Parisian modernism, revealing how he moved from figurative compositions to a language of pure color and form. Full-price ticket: 7,400 HUF (about 20.70 USD). Discount: 4,200 HUF (about 11.75 USD). Capacity: 20. Meeting point: ground floor, exhibition entrance. Tickets available online and on-site, first come, first served.
Across the program calendar, standard guided tours last 60 minutes and cap attendance to keep the experience focused. Whether in the hushed galleries beneath the Castle’s stones or through a laptop screen at home, the exhibition frames Tihanyi’s journey from expressive figuration to abstraction—and the fearless, cosmopolitan curiosity that powered it.
