Sergei Eisenstein: The Mexican Drawings

Courtesy the Russian State Archives of Literature and Art, Moscow

"Untitled" (1931). Ink on paper. 10 x 8 in.

Caravaggio Daumier Sergei Eisenstein Jean Ignace Grandville El Greco Olaf Gulbransson Tintoretto Study Uncovers Hidden Caravaggio Self-Portrait

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In 1931, the pioneering Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein went to Mexico to shoot the epic ¡Que Viva MÉxico!, a film that remains unfinished to this day. He also drew copiously. His drawings, many of which have never been shown to the public, are now on view in a joint exhibition at Extra City and MuKHA in Antwerp. Lyra Kilston talks to the exhibition’s curators, Anselm Franke and Oksana Bulgakowa, about these extraordinary works on paper.

How did you initially come to discover Eisenstein’s collection of drawings? And how did you obtain them?

Anselm Franke: I began to study Eisenstein’s writings a couple of years ago in relation to the preparatory work on a forthcoming exhibition and publication project about animism. Among the great modern artists, Eisenstein is perhaps the most prominent who came to theorize animism in terms of aesthetics in the widest sense, that is, in terms of the processes of subjectivation and objectification initiated by images — his particular case studies being Walt Disney’s animations and chiefly, his Mexico. In the course of the research, however, it proved it would be worth dedicating an entire exhibition to Eisenstein’s drawings made during his visit to Mexico, and that such an exhibition would not only be of interest historically, but would also answer a renewed interest in Eisenstein not merely as a seminal filmmaker, but also as a writer, theorist, and artist beyond his cinematic masterpieces.

Oksana Bulgakowa: The Russian State Archive has the biggest collection of Eisenstein’s drawings. But while working on this project, I was happy to discover some pieces in Mexican private collections that I have never seen before. I was also able to see about 600 drawings that Eisenstein’s widow had sorted out.

Although he had drawn for years, Eisenstein’s work in Mexico took on a new urgency. He wrote that it "underwent an internal catharsis, striving for mathematical abstraction and purity of line." Do you have a theory as to why this occurred?

AF: Mexico, for Eisenstein, was a revelation. As Oksana and others have described, Eisenstein perceived Mexico as the depth of the private psyche being turned inside out, a two-dimensional, graphic surface on which history and collectivity was simultaneously spread out. The revolutionary potential of this reversal, and the simultaneity of past and present fascinated him, as did the hybridity of Mexican visual culture — especially the religious imagery. These discoveries, I think, provided Eisenstein with answers to some of the most urgent questions he had earlier pursued in his art and theoretical reflections. The style and intensity of drawing he developed in Mexico would be sustained until his death.

Is there a marked difference between Eisenstein’s drawing style for his personal drawings and his storyboards for film?

OB: Not really. Eisenstein’s early caricatures, inspired by Grandville’s man-animal, Daumier’s floating forms, and Olaf Gulbransson’s art nouveau line, created an archive of form: circular men and angular old women, masks from the commedia dell’arte and elongated levitating figures. His bestiary (bulls, peacocks, lions, ravens) will reappear in his work at different stages: in the sets and costumes for the eccentric theater productions and Wagnerian opera, in the physiognomic types and dynamic vertical compositions of his frames, in the series of his later drawings — Mexican sketches, production sketches for Ivan the Terrible, his erotic, nostalgic, and parodic drawings. The lines are dancing, the figures are floating, the circular and angular shapes are interconnected and the drawings have no defined center. Later Eisenstein will analyze similar archetypes in Tintoretto and Caravaggio, El Greco, and, most famously, Walt Disney.

extracity.org; mukha.be

"Sergei Eisenstein: The Mexican Drawings" originally appeared in the May 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' May 2009 Table of Contents.