A sweeping retrospective of Lajos Tihanyi, one of Hungarian modernism’s most daring voices, opens with close to two hundred works at 1014 Budapest, Szent György Square (Szent György tér) 2. The exhibition spans his most important paintings, graphics, and personal estate objects, tracing a life that turned silence into color and abstraction. Childhood hearing loss shaped a singular visual language—developed without academic training—that propelled Tihanyi into the vanguard of The Eight (Nyolcak) and made him one of the most original figures in 20th-century Hungarian art. The event program includes on-site and online guided tours in February 2026, alongside special themed walk-throughs by curators, writers, and art historians. Photo materials are under the copyright of the Museum of Fine Arts.
Exhibition Highlights and Access
Visitors can explore this master of rebellious forms and bold color harmonies through guided tours embedded in the temporary exhibition. Entry to guided sessions requires both an exhibition ticket and a program ticket priced at 1,500 HUF (about 4.30 USD) per person. Each tour runs 60 minutes, with a maximum of 17 participants. Meeting point: the information desk.
Available time slots:
– 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
Online Tour From Home
On February 3, 2026, 19:00–20:00, the exhibition unfolds online via Zoom, marking the 140th anniversary of Tihanyi’s birth with a deep dive into his most significant works and personal items. The session fee is 1,500 HUF (about 4.30 USD) per person, with a capacity of up to 90 attendees and a 60-minute runtime. After the live tour, participants gain a one-week pass to navigate the virtual gallery independently—zooming in on artworks, reading gallery texts, and studying the display up close from the comfort of home.
Tihanyi, the Restless Charmer
February 5, 2026, 17:00–18:00: art manager Nóra Winkler and art historian Tünde Topor lead a joint tour titled “Lajos Tihanyi, the Restless Charmer.” It’s a portrait of a singular career, a life of detours, and a legacy that returned home by a winding route. A founding member of The Eight, Tihanyi “painted an entire gallery” of luminaries from early 20th-century Hungarian literary and artistic circles with exceptional acuity. With him, psychological portraiture marched into Hungarian painting—these aren’t just likenesses, they’re full-on studies of the psyche. Beyond his contemporaries, he relentlessly turned the focus on himself in self-portraits, and the late abstract compositions are no less riveting. What do these works and the stories behind them say to people now?
Ticket prices: full 7,400 HUF (about 21.20 USD), discounted 4,200 HUF (about 12.00 USD). Capacity: 36. Meeting point: ground floor, exhibition entrance. Tickets are sold online and on-site on a first-come, first-served basis. After the guided tour, visitors can explore the exhibition independently until 18:45.
Budapest–Berlin–Paris: The Road to Abstraction
February 6, 2026, 16:00–17:00: writer and art historian Rita Halász guides a narrative tour tracing how turn-of-the-century café culture, the Berlin avant-garde, and Parisian modernism fueled Tihanyi’s evolution. The session charts the artist’s journey from figurative compositions to a distilled language of pure color and form, revealing how a cosmopolitan itinerary sharpened his syntax of expressionism and abstraction.
Ticket prices: full 7,400 HUF (about 21.20 USD), discounted 4,200 HUF (about 12.00 USD). Capacity: 20. Meeting point: ground floor, exhibition entrance. Tickets available online and on-site, first-come, first-served.
Dates and City
Budapest anchors the program across multiple days: February 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, and 12, 2026. Each day offers a different angle on Tihanyi’s life and work, whether in person or via screen.
Why Tihanyi Still Resonates
Tihanyi’s story is a creative roar forged in quiet. Losing his hearing as a child, he invented a visual voice that cut through the noise of an era convulsing with change. Self-taught yet never derivative, he helped usher in a frontal assault on academic conformity, amplifying The Eight’s drive toward modernism. Portraits that read minds rather than faces; abstractions that distill experience into color weather systems and muscular geometry. This exhibition and its tours bring that restlessness into focus—how the artist moved through coffeehouses and studios, from Budapest to Berlin and Paris, folding those scenes into a style that still feels fresh and unsentimental.
More February Picks
The museum’s broader calendar fills the month with workshops, family programs, and complementary shows orbiting Hungarian modernism and beyond. Highlights include children’s studio sessions under the banner Recolor It!, the family-friendly Mama, Look! — The Beauty of the Human Body, English and Italian guided tours, a Valentine’s Day program with musical walk-throughs and love-themed selections, plus deep-dive lectures like Gergely Barki’s encore talk Kettő vagy egy sem. Duplázások és hiátusok Tihanyi Lajos életművében (Two or None: Doublings and Gaps in Lajos Tihanyi’s Oeuvre). Running alongside are guided visits to the art of Adolf Fényes (Fényes Adolf), architecture walks from crypt to dome, and toddler and preschool programs from Venice Carnival to color explorations.
The organizers reserve the right to change times and programs.
