'My fight for father's museum'

Arthur Fleischmann worked in various materials

By Dominique Fleischmann

Well, the struggle is almost over. Just a few days to go to the Inauguration of the Arthur Fleischmann Museum in Bratislava on 26 November.

It has taken just over 12 years to bring this project in honour of my father to fruition - a permanent museum containing sculptures representing every genre of my father's career, in the very house where he was brought up.

This is the first time I have ever helped set up a museum, but it seems to have taken an awfully long time.

The artist as a young man in Vienna, holding Dark Figure

My father was born in Bratislava in 1896. After qualifying as a medical doctor, he took up sculpture and left Eastern Europe to travel around the world before settling in London where he spent the last 40 years of his life before his death in 1990.

The changes of the address of the building where my father's family lived reflect the turbulent history of the city (and made locating the house two world wars later very difficult).

The street has changed its name from Biela to Schneweissgasse to Wolkrova and finally back to Biela over the last 100 years as the city has hosted the Hapsburgs, the Allies, the Nazis, the Communists, and now finally its own people.

It is this very burger's house (now painstakingly identified) in the very heart of Bratislava's historic centre where my father grew up 100 years ago that provides the home for the permanent museum.

The museum has been painstakingly renovated

Getting permission to use the house for the museum proved fraught with political complications. After all, it had changed owners many times.

Finally, several court cases later, the mayor of Bratislava, Peter Moravcik, and his lawyer solved the legal deadlock and gave permission for the house to be used.

He placed his seal of approval on the project by purchasing a recently discovered Fleischmann ceramic sculpture and donating it to the museum.

I had originally found the house during my first trip to the then Czechoslovakia in 1990 through the help of a very sprightly 80-year-old guide, Mimi Kucherova, sadly now passed away.

Fleischmann's Perspex fountains will also go on display

Later in that same visit I met Dr Zuzzana Francova who is curator at the City Museum.

The responsibility for running the Fleischmann Museum falls to the director of the City Museum, Dr Peter Hyross, but it is Dr Fancova who has injected the main force to create the Fleischmann Museum over the last decade.

Thirty works of art have been loaned from my father's estate in London and Mr Bernat from the Slovak Embassy in London gallantly volunteered last month to drive the sculptures out to Bratislava in a large lorry.

The struggle over the last 12 years has been mostly to do with money and the funding for the museum.

Fleischman continued working until two weeks before his death aged 93

It is not easy to find indigenous Slovak sponsors and there were few foreign investors in Slovakia in the 90s.

In the end, after all the brochures and information packs we sent out and all the effort we made to approach companies, it was Henkel Slovensko that ultimately approached us wishing to help.

We are now the focus of Henkel Slovensko's Lost Sons project for 2002 and have them as our exclusive sponsor.

On the same day as the museum opening they will also launch a biography written by Dr Marion Pauer and a temporary exhibition of Perspex fountain sculptures by my father at the nearby Mirbach Palace.

Fifty rooms have been reserved at the Danube Hotel for press, academics, friends, colleagues and Trustees of the charity The Arthur Fleischmann Foundation who will be visiting Bratislava from abroad for the opening ceremony.

So here we are, with less than a month to go and everything looks good. I'm off to get my suit dry-cleaned.