Art on the Danube

It all started with Vincent Van Gogh. When Vincent Polakovic was a 10-year-old boy in Poprad, north Slovakia, he saw a reproduction of Van Gogh's Wheatfield with Crows at a friend's house, and fell in love. "I had no idea such art existed," he says. "We didn't have any pictures at home." That glimpse began a journey that has culminated in the Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum, a modern art gallery in the unlikely setting of an artificial peninsula jutting into the Danube's Gabckovo reservoir, some 15 km south of Bratislava. After teaching himself art history and doing a stint as a...