With seemingly boundless energy and ambition, Manzoni aimed to create a series of painted lines that would be deposited in cities around the world and together would equal the circumference of the earth. Only one of these was completed, on 7,200 meters (4.5 miles) of rolled newsprint, and it is exhibited here in its large lead crate. Manzoni influenced generations of conceptual artists by affirming that it was the idea rather than the action that counted. He finally managed to frame our planet, thereby transforming it into an artwork, in what I think is his most brilliant, megalomaniacal, and poetic gesture: a rusty, inverted iron plinth that he deposited in a field in Denmark in 1961 and which, like Atlas, he claimed carried the globe.

"Piero Manzoni" originally appeared in the May 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' May 2009 Table of Contents.