The Flemish artist Bartholomeus Spranger was something of a celebrity in late-16th-century Europe. He secured the patronage of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese of Italy and Pope Pius V; was the court painter to Emperor Maximilian II in Vienna and served Emperor Rudolf II of Austria. In Prague, by the late 1580s, his renown had grown as he became known as a draftsman working in a style that closely resembled that of the Italian Mannerists. He created paintings based on allegories and depicted sexy nudes. But as famous as he was then, his name remains relatively obscure to American audiences today.
“This is an artist whose due is long past,” said Sally Metzler, who is writing Spranger’s catalog raisonné and is guest curator of the exhibition “Bartholomeus Spranger: Splendor and Eroticism in Imperial Prague,” which opens on Nov. 4 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show will span the artist’s career, from the paintings he created in Italy, starting with “The Holy Family,” a miniature on copper from the Galleria Palatina in Florence. There will be loans from major museums in Europe, including the National Museum in Wroclaw, Poland; the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
“It’s not just about his greatest hits but his transformation as an artist,” Ms. Metzler said. “As a young boy, around 1556, he started working in Antwerp, sketching on everything he could; then he apprentices for a landscape artist and creates landscape paintings and finally emerges full-blown as a painter of mythological and erotic subjects, which was very much a part of the intellectual culture of the court. He draws, he paints, he etches and, through his travels, his work and the subjects he chooses change.”
In researching the exhibition, Ms. Metzler has made several discoveries. One came about when she saw a reference to a drawing of an angel in an arcane Austrian book from 1911. But she couldn’t locate the drawing itself.
“I called everybody I could — archivists, curators, museum directors, collectors,” she recalled. “I only had a black-and-white Xerox of it.” Most people she spoke to thought the drawing had been lost or destroyed in the war.
As she kept digging, Ms. Metzler found another reference to the drawing in an auction of autographed books organized by a bookseller in Munich. It turns out that the book included the lost drawing. It belonged to the bookseller’s son, who is lending it to the show.
“It is signed and dated 1605 by the artist, and it even has the place where he drew it — Prague, which is very rare,” she said. It is also Spranger’s last known drawing, she added.
ARMORY’S GLOBAL REACH
There are so many art fairs these days that organizers have to keep reinvigorating them to attract an audience and stand out from the pack.
The Armory Show next spring, from March 5 through 8 on Piers 92 and 94 by the Hudson River, will feature a section devoted to art from the Middle East, North Africa and the Mediterranean. Lawrence Abu Hamdan, based in Beirut and London, has been named its commissioning artist, creating a work that will be on view there, as well as a limited-edition print that will be sold to benefit the Museum of Modern Art.
This is the sixth year that the fair has homed in on art from a specific geographic region, commissioning an artist to represent it and appointing a special curator to organize the section, which it calls Armory Focus. Last year it chose China and tapped Philip Tinari, director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, as organizer. The commissioning artist was Xu Zhen.
This year Omar Kholeif, curator at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, has agreed to be the curator. He will illustrate the region’s growth as an artistic center and plans to include galleries and artists from the region, as well as showcasing site-specific projects.
“It’s about journeys and migrations and the disparate cultures dictated by the context of the city,” Mr. Kholeif said, adding that he aims to shine a light on a broader notion of art history, one that goes beyond the conventions of the Western canon.
Noah Horowitz, executive director of the Armory Show, said that highlighting the Middle East, North Africa and the Mediterranean will “give voice to a part of the art world that is not well represented in the marketplace.”
The fair will also introduce American audiences to Mr. Hamdan, 29, who is better known abroad than here, having had one-man shows in London, Cairo, and Utrecht and Eindhoven in the Netherlands, in addition to being included in group shows, like one at the Tate Modern in London. Known for creating projects that incorporate notions of politics, sound and listening, he said this week that he was hoping to create a project that will come out of a residency he is attending at M.I.T. and that he described as “looking at the way speech can be recovered from the objects.”
Though he doesn’t consider himself a sound artist, he wants to use “listening as a social and political practice, questioning what listening really is.”
DIRECTOR FOR IDEAS CITY
Ideas City, the New Museum’s biennial, was started in 2011 as a platform to address the challenges and future of cities. Now it will have its first director.
This week Lisa Phillips, the New Museum’s director, announced that she has appointed Joseph Grima, a former director of Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York and a former editor of Domus, to take on the job. Ideas City has since gathered steam, with conferences taking place in Istanbul and São Paulo and, soon, Detroit and Athens.
“Ideas City really needs a director,” Ms. Phillips said. “It’s developed so much momentum, and we have so many opportunities in front of us with so many cities asking if we could come to them, that we really needed someone who could run the whole program.”
Ms. Phillips added: “People are focused on urban issues as cities are under significant stress in the 21st century. And we are advocating for the idea of culture and its importance to the future of cities.”