“A short while ago,” remarked a reviewer of a pioneering Russian-French exhibition in Vienna in 1909, “it was a saying that if one scratched a Russian, one discovered a barbarian. Now we understand this more correctly, and in this barbarian we find a great artistic advantage. We envy them for the remains of barbarism which they have managed to preserve.”

A century later, that position holds: we look again, after glasnost, to revelations from Russia to complete and cast a fresh perspective on European history, even to counter a century of decadent capitalist culture. So one of the most compelling stories in art is how, when Russian painters were first exposed to Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse, they seized the modernist ball and – full of patriotic fury, spiritual longing and pride in a peasant heritage – played a whole new and dazzling game with it. Their goal, an abstraction reflecting the transformations of the revolutionary order, was pursued with fanatical zeal, and brought great art as close to political manifesto as it has ever been.