Daniel Spoerri is a Swiss artist famous for his signature “snare-pictures.” These assemblages of objects—most often the remains of a meal—are fixed to a table or board and displayed on a wall, thereby making the horizontal vertical. He was born on March 27, 1930, in Galati, Romania, and his mother and siblings emigrated to Switzerland in 1942. As a young man, he studied classical dance and in 1954 became the lead dancer at the State Opera of Bern, Switzerland. He made his first snare picture in 1960, the same year he became one of the signatories of the New Realism manifesto. He is also associated with the Fluxus movement of which his book, Anecdoted Topography of Chance, an annotated map of his room’s objects,...