Piero Manzoni - Papa of Italian Dada

Since I was introduced to it in college by professors Paul Ford and Kestutis Nakas, I have been obsessed with Dadaism and the surrealism that followed it. For a long time, The Banquet Years by Roger Shattuck, an autodidact scholar who could never exist in this world of extreme specialization, was my bible. I especially love the French playwright, puppeteer and artist Alfred Jarry, followed closely by the readymades and pranks of Marcel Duchamp and then the work of Man Ray. What I didn’t know, before the Artist Wife took the Middlebrow and the Renaissance Son to Magazinno Italian Art in Cold Spring, New York, is that the Dadaists had inspired an Italian innovator named Piero Manzoni.