Sergei eisenstein drawings

It is not common knowledge that the legendary Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein also excelled at drawing. An exhibition at Alexander Gray Associates in New York presents an excellent selection of these works, united by their subject matter — sex.

Eisenstein produced his cycles of drawings "Délire" and "Nothingness"—tortured, flowing, interconnected, self-perpetuating figures without heads that formed.

The works are funny, playful, dynamic, provocative, and incredibly inventive. The compositions of these drawings of bullfights are usually arranged in a circle, with the figures of the animals looming large, wielding enormous phalli and copulating furiously with their enemies, beasts and humans alike. For the artist, the powerful merging of corporeality, death, and sexually charged mythology stimulated a search for new visual symbols of this baroque visuality.

Among the drawings done in Mexico, there is a group of works lampooning the Catholic church and its missionary intervention there as that of an invasion of sexual perverts into the virgin land of indigenous cultures. Here, male and female figures copulate in astounding positions and circumstances, from being penetrated by plant-like forms to enthusiastically celebrating what looks like a sadistic orgy with cut bellies, pools of blood and other shocking sights of debauchery.

In these later works, Eisenstein used line only, minimising shading and the volumetric shaping of figures.

View Sergei Eisenstein's artworks on artnet.

Officers in full uniform, and lame war cripples, distinguished by characteristic decorations on their chests, engage in what appear to be male homosexual acts, with men either donned in cross-dressing paraphernalia and enjoying glasses of champagne or attempting to figure out how to engage in sex while missing multiple limbs.

Later, she passed them for safekeeping to Andrei Moskvin, a cameraman who had worked with Eisenstein on the filming of Ivan Grozny. In his text How I Learned to Draw A Chapter about My Dancing Lessons , Eisenstein told the story of the first drawing made for him by an adult in a space that was used for dancing lessons. As the art critic Annette Michelson noted in her essay about the film-maker, the link between dance and drawing emerged in the notion of the ecstatic, which Eisenstein developed in his writing towards the end of his life.

The subject of his sex drawings — scenes of sexual excess or transgression — was one that could achieve this effect, and so it was used to this end. The exhibition makes it clear that drawing for Eisenstein was a means to develop a visually effective language, which he applied in his work as film director. This show is a must for anyone interested in the expressive representational language of drawing or film.