Giulio Paolini

In 1972 Ileana Sonnabend invited Giulio Paolini to hold an exhibition at her gallery in New York and asked me, after our collaboration on Piero Manzoni, to edit the catalogue. My response was to propose compiling an ample monograph that would cover the entire course of his career. The result was this book, unprecedented at the time since all the galleries used to produce were simple brochures, while the publication, reprinted here, was one of the first in-depth and scholarly studies of a contemporary artist. For me it was a fundamental experience: it marked the beginning of my assumption of the role of a historian in the territory of the present.