Pastels on paper, signed and dated at the lower right - "M / 1950." Drawn on the verso of the cover of a periodical, dated February 1950. Fine. 9.5 x 6.5 inches (24.3 x 16.4 cm).

The Italian writer, editor and translator Eugenio Montale is widely considered one of the greatest Italian lyric poets, and was the recipient of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was also the creator of a large body of visual artworks, largely understudied today, produced between the mid-1940s and the 1970s. Nicola Lucchi writes that Montale's visual artworks "constitute a direct intervention in the postwar cultural debate over the role of the author and the validity of traditional literary and visual languages." ("Painting against the grid: Eugenio Montale's confrontation with the visual arts, in The Italianist, Vol. 36, 2016).