Sex drawings

Over the course of his life, Sergei Eisenstein amassed 5,000 sketches, including his “sex drawings,” which depict various sex acts that are not limited to humans.

During my visit, I could hear faint laughter as visitors viewed the various sex acts on display. The laughter wasn’t just tinged with embarrassment, but perhaps a pleasure in the drawing’s apparent humor. An ardent admirer of Mickey Mouse’s creator, Eisenstein once praised Walt Disney, saying his work was “the greatest contribution of the American people to art.” With their curved contours and anthropomorphized figures, Disney’s influence looms over his drawings.

In real life, sex was a rare thing for Eisenstein, who was bisexual. He hardly practiced it, though presumably not out of volition. As his drawings attest, he had sex on his mind. These playfully perverse sketches unleash his wild, carnal imagination. They evoke a kind of sexual utopia, liberated by gender or any form of constraint or taboo for that matter, and where anyone can fuck anyone or anything. Eisenstein let it all hang out on the page.

“Some dildos are really unpleasant,” Joan Neuberger, a historian at the University of Texas, writes in “Strange Circus: Eisenstein’s Sex Drawings,” a lengthy essay in