Article

Name: The Heritage of N. M. Tarabukin in the Perspective of Semiotics: Sign – Meaning – Life

Authors: Nataliya V. Zlydneva

Institute for Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russian Federation

Abstract:

The article is devoted to the scholary heritage of Nikolai Mikhailovich Tarabukin who was a prominent Soviet art historian of the 1920s-1930s and an employee of the State Academy of Arts in Moscow. He was ahead of his time in many ways, but is thoroughly forgotten today. His works on the theory and history of fine arts marked his attempt to analytical formalization and can be considered the anticipation of Russian semiotic school of the 1970s. The article discusses Tarabukin’s approach to a pictorial image as communication process. The article highlights the problems of the semantic-syntactic complex of pictorial composition, gesture in painting as an universal language of visual arts, the typology of portrait forms in the light of the problem of time in art and the concept of life. Along with the released texts of Tarabukin the unpublished book “Gesture in Art” (1929) is being discussed. It is shown which Tarabukin ideas it’s reveal a deep semiotics and which are distant from it. The theoretical views of the scholar are regarded in the context of the alternative trends in Soviet art of the 1920s which contributes to regard the heritage as part of the semiosphere of the epoque.

Keywords: Tarabukin, painting, semiotics, composition, gesture, portrait, concept of life

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