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Sergei Eisenstein's Erotic Drawing Collection; Soviet Film Director and the Father of Montage!
Sergei Eisenstein's Erotic Drawing Collection; Soviet Film Director and the Father of Montage!
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Eisenstein Sergei



Eisenstein, Sergei Erotic Drawing Collection.

 

Eisenstein, Sergei. (1898-1948). Erotic Drawing Collection. Three original drawings on paper in red, orange, blue and black pencil and crayon, numbered in the upper right corners 41,42 and 45, the second two bearing titles in cyrillic, each signed by the artist and dated 31.12.42. 330 x 220 mm. Previously from the collection of Jean-Claude Marcade and Galia Ackerman, authors of the reference book on Eisenstein's erotic drawings "Dessins Secrets" (Le Seuil, 1999), in which other drawings of this same numbered series are illustrated.

The first drawing, number 41, depicts a male figure wearing red embroidered gloves and holding a large bird whose head (covered in a hat) reaches into a cloud formation which itself forms a large phallus pointing upwards and penetrating a floating red orifice in the sky, while on the ground a voluptuous woman points to the bird above with one hand and caches suggestively towards the man's crotch with the other. Drawing number 42 is titled "Savior," in which the same male figure points overhead to the now enormous bird who has taken on more of the size and quality of a dragon and has plunged its own head through the large and now more fully formed red orifice, as the woman in the foreground gestures to the sky with arms outstretched. In drawing number 45, titled "Always Forward / To New Adventures" the bird flies off overhead as the two figures now paddle off together in what appears to be a large vagina canoe (the final fruition of the floating red orifice?), the male figure rowing while the naked female pushes her derriere into his lap and looks back at him with a broad smile, as somewhat alarmed fish swim in the water before them.

The pioneering Soviet Russian film director and film theorist, Sergei Eisenstein, is often considered to be the "Father of Montage" and is widely acknowledged as a seminal modern artist. He is noted in particular for his silent films Strike (1924), Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1927), as well as the historical epics Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (1944, 1958). A prolific writer of aesthetic and sexual theory, he was also the author of an extraordinary oeuvre of erotic drawings which have remained less known, despite a series of exhibitions and monographs devoted to them over the last 20 years, focused primarily on the collection of the Russian State Archive and examples discovered in Mexican private collections. Both celebrated and disparaged as a successful practitioner of propaganda that served the Stalinist state, Eisenstein himself was at the same time absorbed with European Decadence both as an artistic school and aesthetic sensibility. He even declared: “Had it not been for Leonardo, Marx, Lenin, Freud and the movies, I would in all probability have been another Oscar Wilde.”

 

It is not common knowledge that the legendary Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) also excelled at drawing. 

 

The works are funny, playful, dynamic, provocative, and incredibly inventive. Works done in 1931, shortly after Eisenstein’s arrival in Mexico, for example, display the muscular, energetic bodies of toreadors, horses and bulls, merged in the orgiastic union of death and sex. 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. The style of fleshy, robust figures represented with thick lines made by a dark pencil with red shading resembles that of Mexican muralists, José Clemente Orozco in particular. As Maria Haltunen noted in her dissertation devoted to Eisenstein’s “erotic drawings”, the film-maker’s trip to Mexico opened his eyes to that country’s culture, replete with the images of ancient pagan myths blended with Catholicism. For the artist, the powerful merging of corporeality, death, and sexually charged mythology stimulated a search for new visual symbols of this baroque visuality.1 The influence of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic writings, especially his book on Leonardo da Vinci, directed Eisenstein’s thoughts toward the unconscious and the fundamental role of sexuality in the constitution of the human psyche. 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.

Drawings done after Eisenstein’s return to the Soviet Union are no less provocative than the Mexican ones, but they are more sparsely articulated. In these later works, Eisenstein used line only, minimizing shading and the volumetric shaping of figures. While Eisenstein’s line drawings display his skill in imitating many well-known artists of the day, including Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau and Léon Bakst, in the composition and arrangements of figures, references to Grosz (whom he met during one of his trips to Europe) are more specific. After Eisenstein’s death, his widow, Pera Atasheva, gave most of his drawings to the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI). Atasheva kept a relatively small cache of about 500 drawings that had sexual subject matter, because she feared that they might be considered harmful to the film-maker’s legacy.


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