More than a hundred years after the last Milan monographic exhibition dedicated to Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, held in 1920 at the Galleria Pesaro, Milan returns to pay tribute to the Piedmontese artist (Volpedo, 1868 - 1907) with an exhibition at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, a museum that houses not only his masterpiece, The Fourth Estate, but also other major works of his production.
Curated by Aurora Scotti and Paola Zatti, the exhibition Pellizza da Volpedo (1868-1907). Masterpieces, scheduled from September 26, 2025 to January 25, 2026, is organized by the City of Milan - GAM Galleria d’Arte Moderna together with METS Percorsi d’Arte, with the collaboration of the Pellizza da Volpedo Museums, lenders and creators of a tour itinerary that will extend to Pellizza’s places during the Milan exhibition.
The exhibition route brings together forty works, including paintings and drawings, from public and private Italian and foreign collections. This is a considerable nucleus, especially when compared to the brevity of the artist’s life, who died prematurely at only 39 years old. The exhibition takes place in the five rooms on the ground floor of the Villa Reale dedicated to GAM’s temporary exhibitions, and continues on the second floor in the room housing The Fourth Estate. The layout makes it possible to follow Pellizza’s entire artistic parabola: from his formative years, marked by a realism that he knew how to interpret especially in portraits, to his adherence to Divisionist painting, shared with great masters such as Previati, Grubicy, Segantini and Morbelli, in a language destined to profoundly influence the avant-garde, especially Futurism.
The return of The Fourth Estate to GAM in July 2022, after its stay at the Museo del Novecento, represented the possibility of a direct confrontation, in the museum’s rooms, with masterpieces by Segantini and Previati. A confrontation that highlighted not only the technical experimentation, but also the variety of themes addressed: from social realism to Symbolist suggestions that animated art at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Around The Fourth Estate are displayed in the exhibition some large preparatory cartoons that reveal, on the one hand, the creative process that led to the realization of the famous painting and, on the other, the artist’s deep connection with the great pictorial tradition of the past, reinterpreted according to a typically nineteenth-century spirit and at the same time dropped into the social and cultural instances of his time.
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| GAM Milan, forty works by Pellizza da Volpedo on display to trace his entire artistic parabola |
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