Introduced by Melvyn Bragg
A film about Russian art presented by Edwin Mullins

The 1917 Revolution did not only turn the political world upside down. The artists of revolutionary Russia produced a visual art that matched the excitement of the times. Painters like Kandinsky and Malevich, sculptors like Gabo and Pevsner explored a brilliant new world of abstraction. Architects designed fantastic buildings and monuments fit for a revolutionary people.

Edwin Mullins shows how these brilliant manifestations of the Russian visual genius emerged from what had been a backward and isolated country. He talks to Naum Gabo, the sculptor, who was in Russia after the revolution, and relates what happened to the artists when the ideals of the revolution began to fade.