Franz West at the Baltimore Museum of Art

The most entertaining gallery in the Franz West retrospective at the Baltimore Museum of Art is the first gallery. The most interactive gallery is the second gallery. But the most important gallery is about halfway through the exhibition: It's where curator Darsie Alexander has installed the show's earliest work, the pieces with which West stakes out the territory he will stalk for the rest of his career.

The gallery includes a 1972 untitled work on paper (above) that features a golden patterned ceiling, a nude model, an explanation ("Chez Klimt") and a declaration of intent via West's signature and the date right in the middle. With that work, West announced that the cultural and intellectual history of his hometown of Vienna would be the backbone of his artistic practice. Since then, West's work has explored the work, practice and even jokes about the Secessionists, the Wiener Werkstatte, Freud, the Viennese Actionists, and maybe even a few of Krafft-Ebing's "cereberal neuroses."

(It's worth noting that West leaves alone Vienna's most troubling intellectual and political legacy: its rabid, institutionalized turn-of-the-century anti-Semitism (which eventually led to Hitler's rise), and the corresponding response of Vienna's Jewish intellectual elite, including pioneering Zionist Theodore Herzl. As recently as 2000, Vienna's anti-Semitic past became Austria's present when Jorg Haider and his right-wing Freedom Party formed a coalition government.) 

The Vienna-centrism of West's work should make it difficult for American audiences to absorb: For most American art lovers, the history of modernism runs through Paris, not central Europe. No European artistic capital is as little studied or appreciated in the United States as is Vienna. (When it comes to contemporary art on the continent, Germany looms large, while the rest of central Europe is mostly an afterthought.) Still, much of West's work translates well, in part because, well, it's so much fun. Plus: It likely helps American audiences that West often marries his Wiener references to other 20th-century artists, such as Marcel Duchamp, Richard Tuttle or James Turrell. [Photo: West's Qwertz (2001), on view last year in Rotterdam.]

This is West's first US retrospective. It's necessarily incomplete: Some of West's most ambitious work, such Auditorium (1992), which was presented at Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany, has been site- or event-specific (and Alexander has not included documentation of such projects in the exhibition, though many are mentioned in the catalogue). Furthermore, apparently some of West's most provocative work is too outre for an encyclopedic American museum, even one in John Waters' hometown. Nonetheless, despite the abundance of West's formulaic and often uninteresting works-on-paper, the show serves as a smart, ridonkulously entertaining presentation of a cloying, mischievous artist.

Next: Franz West starts with Gustav Klimt.

Related: The Baltimore Museum of Art acquires a West.