The Engine

TROY at the BRITISH MUSEUM on the 29 TH of January 2020 The British Museum’s exhibition Troy is a history of the city and its conflict in a thousand objects.   Through the words of Homer and, later, Virgil, we first glimpse daily life in the city and the beginnings of a conflict that will envelop the region, drawing in other, disparate forces. The first window into Troy that we encounter in the exhibition are Homer’s epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey .   The words of the poet are read, both in Greek and in English.   A part of Virgil’s Aeneid is also read, since it deals with the founding of Rome by Aeneas, a Trojan prince and survivor of the fall of Troy.   Nothing about Homer is certain.   We have no birthdate or a date for his/her birthday.   We do not know Homer’s gender, sexuality, colour or even if he/she was one person or many.   However, we do know about Homer’s religion.   Homer believed in the gods who were thought to res...

Dora Maar at the Tate Modern on the 26 th January 2020 Dora Maar seems an obvious figure worthy of recognition, her role in 20 th century art a site of revision.   She is known publicly as Picasso’s muse, his portraits of Dora Maar are, indeed, included in this exhibition.   However, Picasso is not the subject here. A heroine of Surrealism and Modernism, Maar was born in 1907, the daughter of a Croatian émigré and a French mother who was also a devout Catholic.   Her father was an architect who moved the family to Buenos Aires in 1910 but returned to Paris in 1926.   Maar was born Henrietta Theodora Markovitch, in Paris she enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Academie Julien and embarked on a career as a fine artist.   She quickly traded this career for the life of a photographer, changing her name to Dora Maar, in order to exploit commercial possibilities in fashion, advertising and erotica.   Maar realised the inherent possibilities in t...