The artistic evolution of Giovanni Bartolomucci leads him to the City (as a place where everything may happen, and all experiences may be acquired), to the spell that a city may cast expecially into an artistically minded young man of the countryside. He moves to Terni and Rimini and finally to Rome, where in the middle of the fifties he is among the founders of Astralism, the artistic movement brought to shape by the impression of the first space endeavours; he later moves, beyond the ocean, to New York, where the new artistic trends and experiences are brought into existence. In a studio on Carnagie Hall, he lives in New York for two years, renewing his expressive means and opening his vision. The first men on the moon, shown at an exposition in Washington, comes to become part of the Kennedy Collection at the White House.

Sandra Giannattasio has tried in the seventeens to reconstruct the artistic iter of Giovanni Bartolomucci, from the first accademic figurative and verist experiences to the more informal ones in the sixties and the later abstract experiences. She talked about a sort of mutation due for the biggest part to the explosive effect that Abstract expressionism bestowed upon him during his stay in New York, that did, however, not cut his italian and european roots . «Giovanni Bartolomucci - she concluded - proposes in a modern form the europen expressionistic experiences, but his expressionism takes a dreamlike, visionary and fantastic shape, when he paints about allucinations and apparences, nightmares and dreams of the man of the city».

Those notes, yet, do not suffice to fully depict Giovanni Bartolomucci. He has lived, along with the artists of his generation, the dramatic conflict between figurative and abstract art, conflict not yet definitely resolved in his art; yet in the oscillation he carved his individual characteristics, by enriching and shaping his expressive means. His recent paintings - from Attesa to Volto di donna, to Venere '73, to Donne in piazza,from Andromaca e un musicante to Alce, from Aida to Amneris e Demetra - clearily testify this enrichment and shaping, with extraordinarily elegant results.

Many awards have framed Giovanni Bartolomucci's activity, as many are the extimators of his career. Among the former we may quote the Premio Abruzzo e Molise in '58,the Oscar for wall decorations in New York in '60, the award Marina di Ravenna in '68, the award Pasqua in Roma during the Holy Year celebrations of '84, the first prize of Casa della Cultura Carlo Levi of Teramo in '85; among the latter, Michele Diancale, Vito Apuleo, Arturo Bovi, Lorenza Trucci, Jolena Baldini, Eraldo Miscia, Ugo Moretti, Valerio Mariani. Many of his endavours are part of public and private collections in Italy, France, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Germany, USA and Argentina.

He died in Rome on Nov 14^th, 1996.

Costanzo Costantini