Painting against the grid: Eugenio Montale's confrontation with the visual arts

Abstract

This article proposes a new interpretation of the vast and understudied corpus of paintings and drawings produced by the poet Eugenio Montale between the mid-1940s and the 1970s. While critics have mostly discussed these artworks in connection with Montale's poetry from the interwar years, I argue, rather, that they constitute a direct intervention in the postwar cultural debate over the role of the author and the validity of traditional literary and visual languages. The article is subdivided in three parts: the first section surveys the style and prevalent motifs of Montale's art; the second section analyses its flawed critical reception through the close reading of relevant documents; and the third part illustrates the details of my argument on the basis of three major case studies, with references to contemporary artists such as Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri and Piero Manzoni.