Bratislava, City of Sculpture

The Slovak capital city, which was Pressburg to the Viennese and Pozsony to the Hungarians, has been a great city for sculpture for the last several centuries, and continues so to to this day. Prominent Viennese sculptors like G. R. Donner and Viktor Tilgner left some of their best public work here. Although he acquired no public during his frustrated career, the eccentric F. X. Messerschmidt, who fled to his brother's home here after failure in Vienna, created in Pressburg an outlandish body of work that has come to outshine his successful contemporaries. The 20th century forced locals Arthur Fleischmann into exile, and Juraj Meliš into conceptual protest work, but since the 1989 Revolution, the late Fleischmann acquired his own museum in Old Town, and the still-active Meliš may consider Old Town itself an open-air museum of his charming popular work since Communism's demise. Also since the Revolution, G. H. Meulensteen and Vincent Polakovič built the extraordinary Danubiana Museum, with its lovely sculpture garden on the Danube, just 15 km downriver from Bratislava. The Slovak capital, then, is a super spot for a sculpture tour for visitors to central Europe. After our walkabout among Bratislava's sculptural attractions (including admissions at 5 museums, at guests' expense), we will boat, bike, or bus to the Danubiana.