More than a century after the last and only monographic exhibition dedicated to the Piedmontese artist, held in 1920 at the Galleria Pesaro, Milan retraces the artistic and biographical story of Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo (1868-1907) in an exhibition conceived by the Modern Art Gallery which preserves, in addition to his masterpiece, the Fourth Estate, some equally significant works of his artistic production.

Curated by Aurora Scotti and Paola Zatti, the project is co-produced by the Municipality of Milan GAM - Modern Art Gallery with METS Art Paths, a cultural association that has been promoting Italian art of the nineteenth century and in particular the divisionist painters for years, and is carried out in collaboration with the Pellizza da Volpedo Museums, lenders and creators of a visiting route that during the Milan exhibition will extend to the places related to Pellizza.

The exhibition consists of forty works including paintings and drawings from Italian and foreign public and private collections, and a very significant number of masterpieces, considering the short life of the artist, who died at the age of only 39. Articulated in the five rooms on the ground floor of Villa Reale reserved for GAM's temporary exhibitions and in the Fourth Estate room on the first floor of the museum, the exhibition documents the artist's entire journey, from his training, which took place within the boundaries of a realism that Pellizza managed to interpret with character and confidence, to the great divisionist adventure, in a reflection shared with other great interpreters (from Previati to Grubicy, from Segantini to Morbelli) and experimenters of a technique destined to leave a deep mark on the next generation, especially in the futurist avant-garde.

The return of the Fourth Estate to GAM, in July 2022, after a period of exhibition at the Museum of the Twentieth Century, was an opportunity to reflect on the overall value of Pellizza da Volpedo in the context of the divisionist experience, also thanks to the possibility of a direct comparison, in the museum rooms, with some absolute masterpieces of his time, especially the great representations by Gaetano Previati and Giovanni Segantini. A comparison that also extends beyond the experimentation of the painting technique, documenting the most typical subjects of painting at the turn of the two centuries, from those linked to social realism to the complex themes inspired by reflections of symbolist influence. Around the Fourth Estate, in an unprecedented and impactful reconstruction, some of the great preparatory cartoons are exhibited, documenting on one hand the genesis of the work and on the other the artist's connection with the great art of the past, which Pellizza manages to evoke in a completely nineteenth-century practice in a subject full of his time.