Exactly a century ago, the Bolshevik Revolution swept aside the autocratic Tsarist rule in Russia and installed a Soviet Socialist regime that at one stage promised to liberate the rest of the world from its capitalist overlords.

The Western capitalist regimes conspired to choke the young Soviet state with various blockades, armed aggression and subversive activities, while the Soviets struck back through art. Virtually all of the Russian artists joined the Bolshevik cause and devised new art forms through which to celebrate the inspirational values of the world proletariat. Avant-garde artists in Russia, even prior to the revolution, had already been working on revolutionary art forms that incorporated elements of futurism, primitivism and cubism. Following the revolution, their art moved from the margins to centre stage. Constructivism became the official art form of the revolutionary state and spread into every conceivable medium from painting, sculpture and graphics to ceramics, typography, fabrics, poetry, music and theatre design.

It is somewhat ironic that the spark of the Russian revolution, having failed to ignite the world revolution in the capitalist countries, subsequently saw these very countries obsessively collect Russian constructivist art. Artists including Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin and Alexandr Rodchenko, have become some of the most expensive artists in the world and the National Gallery of Australia, primarily under the inspired leadership of its inaugural director James Mollison, assembled one of the most significant collections of this art anywhere in the world, outside of Russia.

The Russian avant-garde is a major and stunning exhibition that through scores of art objects documents an orientation in art that had a profound impact on the course of 20th century art, throughout the world, including Australia. Unlike many early 20th century avant-garde art movements internationally, the Russian avant-garde was dominated by women artists, including Natalia Goncharova, Lyubov Popova, Olga Rozanova, Varvara Stepanova, Alexandra Exeter and Nadezhda Udaltsova, most of whom are featured in this exhibition. Goncharova was a brilliant, but ultimately tragic artist, whose vibrant primitivist canvas, Dancing Peasants (1910/11) is one of the highlights of this exhibition. While she was working with the Ballets Russes in Europe, the revolution and WWI broke out and she was stranded in the West for the rest of her life, while pining for Russia and the richness of its folk art traditions.

Kazimir Malevich strongly believed that the new era demanded a new art form and it was one that reflected the technological and spiritual realities of the new age. He called this new art Suprematism in which feeling, emotion and spirit prevailed over materialist and earthly values. He abandoned the idea of copying objects from a seen reality and embraced a new "objectless" art in which forms and colours would convey feelings and spiritual content. Malevich's House under construction (1915/16), one of the treasures of the Canberra collection, was acquired by Mollison in 1974 and would today be an inconceivable purchase by any Australian public gallery. The last Malevich painting on the art market sold for $60 million. House under construction is a profoundly immersive viewing experience in which shapes derived from geometric forms float within a void and after a few minutes you become lost in a meditative state. Suprematist paintings were in part seen as new icons of a post-religion era.

Suprematist elements were absorbed into Constructivism and in this exhibition, there are superb examples of Constructivist graphics, posters and ceramics, where design is married with function to create striking and very memorable artworks. The emerging Soviet state not only exported to the West examples of its avant-garde art as cultural propaganda, but the artists themselves went on tours, including the poet Sergei Esenin with his dancer wife, Isadora Duncan, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and the artist El Lissitzky. This new artistic language was quickly absorbed by numerous western artists, particularly those at the Bauhaus in Germany, and from there spread to America and Australia.

In the Soviet Union, avant-garde artists including Alexandr Rodchenko and Gustav Klucis, became some of the pioneers of this movement and are richly represented in this exhibition with their striking artistic inventions that have not aged over the decades. In 1919 Vladimir Tatlin designed his Monument to the Third International as a 400-metre-high building (roughly twice the size of the Empire State building) in which there are two spirals, twisting upwards and displaced in relation to each other. This exhibition contains a very rare publication by Tatlin from 1920 with this design that has been echoed throughout the world, including in buildings in Canberra and Melbourne.

Tatlin's monument was never realised and by the 1930s many of the avant-garde artists themselves lost their freedom of expression with mounting tyranny of Stalinist oppression. This exhibition in a brilliant and provocative manner opens a window on one of the most significant developments in 20th century art.