A fundamental objective of these drawings is to make explicit the shameless rituality that is the undercurrent of sexuality—beginning with notable formal strategies ranging from meticulous single line drawings to ones made with the celerity of the eraser or the sketch, where lines of varying thickness multiply and alternate, acquiring, in both cases, uncanny creases. Drawn on all kinds of paper, including sheets with hotel or inn headings, these sketches rebel against any kind of realist reference and form a thematic bridge spanning from biblical and Greco-Latin sagas to pre-Hispanic mythologies.

It is said that this all began with an early childhood memory Freud attributes to Leonardo da Vinci, as extracted by Eisenstein in The Psychology of Art: “It seemed to me that while I was in my cradle, a dovetail [a kind of falcon] descended on top of me, opened my mouth with its tail and pecked at me various times between the lips.” This image, charged with pain and pleasure, had a transcendental impact on Eisenstein, who theoretically pursued the latent content of this scene, a testament to the sexual impulse that the psychoanalytic web, like many other things, never fully revealed, but in the child’s mind fomented unfoldings and mysteries.

Sergei Eisenstein arrived to the Americas at the dawn of the thirties, rather overwhelmed by the revolution that had been put in place, at the precise moment when the Soviet Union’s major avant-garde movements were beleaguered by a political agenda that saw art as a fundamentally useful medium for disseminating the propaganda of government ideologues, simplifications of the relationship between the masses and power. The tightening of cultural politics, with the rise of Stalin, ground down the artistic vertigo of a revolution that had originally conceived of art as a field for experimentation intended to disrupt the ideas of the classical tradition. Eisenstein arrives in Mexico in December of 1930, after seeing the failure of various projects in the United States. Not all that removed from touristic enthusiasm—the Soviet visitor referred to the Mexican territory as a Garden of Eden bound to the splendor of laziness —the country of the sun, its history, its enigmas, the revolutionary mythology, and its primitivism, exercise an enormous fascination for the young creator who, at twenty- six, had already made two foundational films of cinematographic language: Strike and Battleship Potemkin. His stay in post-revolutionary Mexico lasted a little over two years. A majority of the drawings will emerge as a result of this stay, —which will assume bucolic hues—a tremendous record constituting an open affirmation of pre-conceived notions, which had previously appeared in more veiled terms in his films or which would be integrated into later films by way of humorous or dramatic metaphors, juxtapositions, and ellipses.

about the artist

The versatile artist Serguei Eisenstein (Riga, Latvia 1898–Moscow, Russia, 1948)  has long been renown for his cinematic oeuvre, and his revolutionary theories of montage and of the psychology of art. A student of civil engineering before the October Revolution, he joined the Red Army during the Civil War, where he gained his first experience as a director and scenographer in small performances for the troops. After demobilisation, he studied theatre with Meyerhold and joined the Proletkult in Moscow, where his first film venture was an experimental short as part of a radical staging of an Ostrovsky classic. For the Proletkult, he made the feature Strike (1924), which led to a commission for what became The Battleship Potemkin (1925), commemorating the 1905 revolution. That film’s international success led to a major commission for October (1928), marking the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. Both October and its successor The Old and the New (1929) were subject to political revision as Stalin tightened his grip on Soviet culture, although they included Eisenstein’s most radical montage experiments.

In 1929, Eisenstein and his colleagues Alexandrov and Tisse set off on a journey through Europe, to learn more about sound film techniques, during which they received an invitation from Paramount to work in Hollywood. But over six months, all the projects they proposed were rejected, and as a last resort Eisenstein accepted private funding to make a film in Mexico that would reflect that country’s revolutionary transformation. After a year’s shooting in Yucatan, Oaxaca and Hidalgo, the American financiers cut off funding, leaving Eisenstein to return to the USSR, believing that his footage would follow to be edited in Moscow. This never happened, and the American financiers sold off the footage to a range of commercial users, before Eisenstein’s former assistant, Alexandrov, made a version in 1979.

For Eisenstein, losing Que Viva Mexico! was the greatest tragedy of his creative life. But the fifteen months he spent in Mexico renewed his graphic inspiration, producing hundreds of drawings, and also shaped a project that would dominate the rest of his life: a study of the roots of artistic expression that he called ‘The Fundamental Problem’, or Method. 

Back in the USSR, many projects were vetoed and his next film Bezhin Meadow (1936) was banned after completion. It was only a popular epic drawn from Russian history, Alexander Nevsky (1938) that restored his reputation with Stalin, and led to an invitation to recreate the era of the first tsar of all Russia, Ivan IV. Made during the Second World War, the first part of Ivan the Terrible won Stalin’s admiration in 1944, but the second part, portraying Ivan’s later paranoia, was banned and remained unseen until 1958.

When he died of heart failure in 1948, only a fraction of Eisenstein’s vast body of writing was known. Since then, much of it has been published and widely translated, including his ‘immoral’ memoirs. And his copious drawings, only exhibited once during his lifetime, have increasingly been seen and appreciated, making him a truly multimedia artist seventy-five years after his premature death.