The Body of the Line: Eisenstein's Drawings

Produced by the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, Montreal, and curated by Jean Gagnon, in his first U.S. museum exhibition, The Drawing Center presented over 100 drawings of influential Russian filmmaker Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (1898–1948) in recognition of the centennial of his birth. Though Eisenstein revolutionized the world of cinema with works such as The Battleship Potemkin, 1925, his drawings had remained largely unknown; the exhibition offered a rare opportunity to view striking works on paper by one of the seminal figures of early motion picture direction.

Dating between 1914 and 1948, the drawings ranged from Eisenstein's student sketchbooks, his exuberant Mexican period, to his last works on paper. Selected from the over 5,000 works by Eisenstein held by the permanent collection of the Russian State Archives of Literature and Art, Moscow—the primary lender to the exhibition—the pieces in the exhibition focused specifically on representations of the body, one of the primary themes of his practice as a visual artist. Also featured were costume and set sketches from a private Moscow collection assembled by Lydia Naumova, a member of the production crew for Ivan the Terrible.