Budapest’s €1.5bn Gauguin show revisits Van Gogh’s Arles

By Elena Vasquez

The Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest opened a 150-work exhibition on Gauguin this week, insured at €1.5 billion, according to The Art Newspaper, which said exhibition valuations are rarely revealed.

Titled Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin: The Circles of Post-Impressionists and Symbolists, the show runs until 28 February 2027. It combines 80 works by Gauguin with 70 by other artists and examines his relationships with fellow painters.

The artistic result of the Montpellier visit anchors the Museum of Fine Arts’s wide-ranging study of Gauguin and his associates. The title comes from Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin (late 1889), the key painting inspired by that journey.

What happened during the Montpellier visit?

According to the Museum of Fine Arts, Gauguin arrived in Arles in October 1888 to stay with his friend, the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh. They painted together, then socialized and discussed art over wine.

Their different personalities produced rows inside the Yellow House, where they shared a small studio. Winter weather prevented outdoor work and worsened the friction.

According to the exhibition, Gauguin proposed a visit to the renowned Musée Fabre in Montpellier, 70 km west of Arles, to clear the air. The museum held more than 800 paintings. Although a day trip on either 16 or 17 December 1888 has long been assumed, the exhibition says the artists probably stayed overnight and covered both days. Their train ride took around four hours.

The excursion yielded a major Gauguin canvas but did not repair the artists’ working relationship.

How did Courbet shape both painters?

The Art Newspaper identifies Courbet’s landscape composition Bonjour Monsieur Courbet (1854) as Gauguin’s highlight at the Musée Fabre. It shows Courbet, carrying equipment and holding a walking pole, greet Alfred Bruyas and the collector’s bowing servant. Bruyas, a local Courbet patron, had donated many of the museum’s finest French paintings.

The Art Newspaper traces Gauguin’s response to Le Pouldu a year later. Gauguin painted himself facing a Breton woman across a gate. His rough brushwork contrasts with Courbet’s smooth handling, although both scenes greet other people and include a dog. Courbet appears delighted; Gauguin’s exchange is fleeting.

Lead curator Judit Geskó reads Gauguin’s figure as “the artist as a solitary wanderer.” The exhibition notes that Gauguin nevertheless acknowledged Courbet directly: his title refers to the older painter and is inscribed on the canvas at lower left.

Gauguin made two versions of Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin. The original, on loan from the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, was painted for the dining-room door of his small inn in Le Pouldu. The other belongs to the National Gallery in Prague and was unavailable for borrowing.

Van Gogh was particularly struck by Courbet’s portraits at the museum. The exhibition identifies The Man with the Pipe (around 1849) as a possible model for Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe (January 1889), painted one month later.

He also admired portraits of Bruyas by several artists. To Theo, he described Bruyas as “a gentleman with a beard, red hair, who looks damnably like you or me.”

Courbet supplied the shared model, while Gauguin turned it toward solitude and Van Gogh toward painted self-examination.

Could art repair the artists’ rift?

The exhibition records both men as devoted admirers of Courbet, whose work was well represented at the Musée Fabre. Their tastes otherwise diverged. Vincent wrote to Theo that their Montpellier discussions were “excessively electric.” He explained: “We sometimes emerge from it with tired minds, like an electric battery after it’s run down.”

The visit nevertheless seemed successful and briefly reconciled the pair. Reporting to Theo the day after their return, Vincent said they had been “right in the midst of magic.” He added: “Gauguin said to me this morning, when I asked him how he felt: ‘that he could feel his old self coming back’, which gave me great pleasure.”

Four days later, Van Gogh severely mutilated his ear. The likely trigger was news that Theo had become engaged, which Vincent feared would threaten his brother’s financial support. The exhibition also identifies tension with Gauguin as a contributing factor.

The museum visit restored their artistic confidence for only four days before personal pressures returned.

What does the Budapest exhibition include?

The show includes three Van Gogh works, including two rarely displayed drawings from the Museum of Fine Arts collection:

• Field with Irises near Arles (May 1888, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam).
• The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Winter (March 1884), from the Budapest museum’s collection.
• Haystacks (July 1888), from the Budapest museum’s collection.

Two Gauguin paintings also come from his 1888 stay with Van Gogh in Arles:

• Les Alyscamps (October 1888, Musée d’Orsay, Paris).
• Madame Roulin (November–December 1888, Saint Louis Art Museum).

The exhibition notes that Van Gogh also painted both subjects.

Another highlight is Sunflowers on an Armchair (1901), from the Bührle Collection and on loan to the Kunsthaus Zurich. The Art Newspaper notes that it is one of four still lifes inspired by Van Gogh’s sunflower motif. Gauguin painted them in the Marquesas Islands, north of Tahiti, using seeds sent by a friend in Paris.

The Museum of Fine Arts estimates that up to 350,000 people will visit the Gauguin show, a substantial number for a medium-sized European capital. The projection would remain below the 486,000 who attended Geskó’s 2006 Van Gogh exhibition at the same museum.

For the Museum of Fine Arts, the 350,000 forecast will test whether Gauguin can approach the 486,000-person audience of Judit Geskó’s 2006 Van Gogh show.