Franz West's 2007 Interview Republished Alongside Centre Pompidou Retrospective

Back in 2007, Tom Eccles interviewed Austrian artist Franz West, and now that conversation is being re-released alongside a major exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, running until December 10. West, who died on July 25, 2012, at the age of sixty-five, shared insights about growing up in postwar Vienna amid the ruins and lingering effects of Nazism. He described living in the Karl-Marx-Hof housing project, where his mother performed dental work without anesthetics. West entered art school at twenty-six after a chaotic youth marked by drug use and travels to Baghdad and Tehran. He also discussed his connections with the Viennese Actionists and his 1978 Adaptive sculptures. The interview was originally part of ArtReview's October 2012 issue and featured in a 2008 book by the Baltimore Museum of Art.