Abstract

Drawing on four little-studied articles by N.M. Tarabukin from 1927 and 1928, this article examines his formulation of the concept of “genre as a problem of style”. Understanding style as the product of a specific artistic worldview, Tarabukin selects for analysis — conducted largely on the material of Western European art from antiquity to Cezanne — four major pictorial genres: landscape, portrait, still life, and genre painting. He treats these genres not in a descriptive-historical register but as a problem of style and, in methodological terms, as a theoretical construct. Tarabukin is concerned less with what these genres depict than with “how they transform, interpret, and embody their subject matter in formal and stylistic terms”. A proponent of the formal method and of objective analysis, Tarabukin opposes “literariness” to a “sense of pictorialness”. In characterizing styles, he employs such paired designations as the “living” (nature vivante), associated especially with portraiture and landscape, and the “dead” (nature morte), characteristic of still life. Without addressing contemporary art directly, he nonetheless views still life as the outcome of a new worldview, treating it as a distinct stylistic formation (“the still-life style”). One of his criteria for the “effective power of art” is “inner contentfulness,” set against “externally registered form”. Comparable reflections — grounded in an understanding of genre as not only narrative but also stylistic — are to be found in A.A. Fedorov-Davydov’s book Russian Art of Industrial Capitalism (1929). Locating the origins of a “new style” of painting in the landscapes of the “neo-realists” of the 1890s, Fedorov-Davydov carries his account forward to the Bubnovyi valet (Jack of Diamonds) group and argues that the evolution of this “new style” proceeds through a successive replacement of a landscape-based approach by a still-life-based one, a process that ultimately produces the “de-plotting” (the loss of narrative subject) of painting. The quotations assembled here introduce readers to Tarabukin’s little-known texts and to the elegance of his exposition, whose claims about art are often apparently paradoxical.