A Page from the #DrawingPapers Archive This page from Drawing Papers 4 features “Delirium” drawing with ink on paper by Sergei Eisenstein in 1937. The 2000 exhibition “The Body of the Line” offered a rare opportunity to view striking works on paper by the influential Russian filmmaker Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein. The graphic modes of caricature and the comic strip appeared at a very early stage in Eisenstein’s work. At first in the student sketchbooks, and throughout preparatory drawings for theatrical productions, the clownish, or rather the burlesque, recurs and agitates the line of the figures. With a tendency toward the scandalous and eccentric, the grotesque becomes more and more characteristic of Eisenstein’s drawing technique for outlining an exploration of the body and exteriorizing political and ideological conflicts of the moment. Drawn instinctively and quickly with frenetic energy, as if not to disturb the unconscious, the linear movements in his drawings embody vita...