Original drawing on paper in red and black pencil and crayon, titled in French "Amour!!!?", numbered 4 and signed by the artist and dated 29.12.42. 326 x 220 mm. Framed to 13.75 x 16.75 inches. The work depicts two female figures, one facing right and looking at a mirror while wearing a mask of a bearded man with a large nose around her waist, her companion wearing fanciful striped stocking and kicking up her leg and she gleefully uses the nose of the mask affixed to her friend in order to pleasure herself. Previously from the collection of Jean-Claude Marcadé and Galia Ackerman, authors of the reference book on Eisenstein's erotic drawings "Dessins Secrets" (Le Seuil, 1999), in which are illustrated selected related works from the same series accomplished on the 29th through 31st of December, 1942 on pages 98 - 110.
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.’’
Original drawing on paper in red and black pencil and crayon, titled in French "Amour!!!?", numbered 4 and signed by the artist and dated 29.12.42. 326 x 220 mm. Framed to 13.75 x 16.75 inches. The work depicts two female figures, one facing right and looking at a mirror while wearing a mask of a bearded man with a large nose around her waist, her companion wearing fanciful striped stocking and kicking up her leg and she gleefully uses the nose of the mask affixed to her friend in order to pleasure herself. Previously from the collection of Jean-Claude Marcadé and Galia Ackerman, authors of the reference book on Eisenstein's erotic drawings "Dessins Secrets" (Le Seuil, 1999), in which are illustrated selected related works from the same series accomplished on the 29th through 31st of December, 1942 on pages 98 - 110.
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.’’