Shop art print and framed art Le 4e état by Giuseppe Pellizza

The Fourth Estate (Italian: Il quarto stato) is an oil painting by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, originally titled The Path of Workers and made between 1898 and 1901. It depicts a moment during a labor strike when workers' representatives calmly and confidently stride out of a crowd to negotiate for the workers' rights. Its name refers to the working class as standing alongside the three traditional estates that divided power between the nobility, clergy, and commoners. Pellizza made three separate large-scale preliminary versions of the work to experiment with his divisionist representations of color. After his death, The Fourth Estate became a popular Italian socialist image and was reproduced extensively despite its initial shunning by formal art circles. Over time, its acclaim grew until it became recognized as one of the most important Italian paintings of the turn of the 20th century. The painting is now at the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Milan. Following the Italian Risorgimento, the peasant and bourgeois classes of the new country had an uncertain relationship.:?140? Some bourgeois intellectuals bemoaned the lowering of Italian culture, while artists—particularly the divisionists—brought social themes into their artwork. Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo tried to unite the techniques of divisionism with the influence of the farmers' mutual aid society he had joined in his hometown of Volpedo and the socialist writings of the Second International.:?141 Pellizza began to [...]

 

This artwork is a painting from the modern period. It belongs to the pointillism style.

 

Find the full description of Le 4e état by Giuseppe Pellizza on Wikipedia.