Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo
( Volpedo, Alessandria, 28 July 1868; d 14 June 1907).
Italian painter.
He came from a farming family and in 1884 began attending drawing classes at the Accademia di Brera in Milan. He also began to study painting, first with Giuseppe Puricelli (1832-94) and then in 1886-7 with Pio Sanquirico (1847-1900), but in 1887 he broke off his studies at the Brera and moved to Rome in order to attend the Accademia di S Luca. He very soon became disappointed by the teaching there, which he combined with attendance at the life class at the Academie de France, and went to Florence, where from 1888 he was a pupil of Giovanni Fattori at the Accademia di Belle Arti. After a few months he returned to Volpedo, where he began executing portraits and landscapes that show the influence of the Macchiaioli in their limpid layers of light and geometrically balanced compositions (e.g. Portrait of the Poor Girl and the Piazza di Volpedo, both 1888; both priv. cols; see Scotti, 1986, pl. nos 400, 403). In the autumn of 1888, wanting to consolidate his drawing skills, Pellizza moved to Bergamo, where he studied under Cesare Tallone at the Accademia Carrara di Belle Arti. In October 1889 he visited the Exposition Universelle in Paris, but early in 1890 he returned for two months to the Accademia Carrara.
Pellizza, considered a neo-impressionist artist, was a divisionist painter - using small dots of paints according to specific color theory.
In 1901, he brought out The Fourth State, which had devoted ten years of study and effort. The work, exhibited the following year to Quadriennial Turin, did not obtain recognition hoped. This rich, expressive work has become a well-known symbol for progressive and socialist causes in Italy, and throughout Europe.
In 1906 he was called to Rome, where he was able to sell only''''The framework for the Gallery of Modern Art.
The artist committed suicide in his studio on the morning of 14 June 1907 after the death of his wife in childbirth and third child.
