The first room of the Neue Galerie’s “Russian Modernism: Cross-Currents of German and Russian Art, 1907 – 1917” (on view through August 24), takes us back to a vanished world. This is a world of silk stockings and fiacres, cavalry officers, and the Woman Question: the modern world. It’s a cosmopolitan world, alive to the distortions of human perception, and an international world in which Russian artists looked West and Western artists looked to Africa for inspiration. It will not last much longer.

In this show the artists wear their influences heavily. The attempts to deploy cubism or Cezanne, Gauguin or fauvism often feel overly rigid, as if the artists were trying on different styles but hadn’t quite found the right mix yet. However, there’s a certain exhilaration in this willingness to switch styles. The rooms are mostly divided thematically (the one exception is a room devoted solely to abstract art), which means that both the style and the mood of neighboring pieces can vary widely. This turns out to be a relief if you are not particularly in love with cubism, or dyspepsia.

The first room’s cityscapes are filled with jewel tones: wine red, midnight blue, amethyst. Boris Grigoriev offers a cafe scene, 1913’s “Cafe Chantant,” with the familiar jaded heavy-lidded man and scheming feline woman; Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s “Tightrope Walk” shows sallow-skinned, lunging and toe-pointing circus performers. Life’s a bit decadent and still a bit fun.

The room of still-lifes and landscapes ranges from Ilya Mashkov’s 1910 “Still-Life with Fruit,” with its sci-fi sunset background, to Natalia Goncharova’s 1913 “Dynamo Machine,” a crisp modern thing with perky yellow explosions. (Goncharova is one of the standouts of this exhibit. She worked in a wide range of styles but her paintings are always pleasurable to look at, whether she’s giving you blocks of giant crowding sunflowers or lovely Russian peasant women among lovely Russian peasant trees.) Goncharova’s dynamo isn’t menacing or crushing humanity; it’s an optimistic vision of the machine. August Macke’s “Strollers at the Lake II” looks like somebody spilled a Tissot: a civilized scene, but representative art is breaking up into blocky blurs.

In this room we begin to see the country living and folkways which would captivate Russian artists of the 1910s. The gallery’s captions point out that some of the rural scenes (and, presumably, some of the foreign ones) are the result of the laws restricting Jewish settlement. But there was also a self-conscious movement to honor and adapt Russian folk art and traditions. As artistic inspiration, at least, this turn to narod (which has had its own unsavory political uses) proved much more fruitful and human than the Nazi fetish for the Volk.

Pyotr Konchalovsky’s 1910 “House of the Lover of Bullfights” is a glorious thing: melting colors, iridescent lilac and turquoise sky, the white house with notes of yellow and mauve. The show notes that the “strident, almost violent palette” of many of these artists “was deemed shocking to many at the time,” but nature herself is frequently garish. Vassily Kandinsky’s (the show’s other standout for me) “Murnau: Street with Women” is golden, sunlit, under the glowing red and orange roofs of the houses—but then the women and child are spooky hollow-eyed starers. It’s not the color in this picture that is unnatural and shocking but the contrast between our beauty-drenched world and the inadequate human response to it.

The room of portraits ranges from horrifying to tender. Many of these people have big, canny eyes; many are oddly green. There’s Aristarkh Lentulov’s 1915 “Self-Portrait with Women Bathers,” where the artist looks like a degenerate doll being kicked about by Sacher-Masoch dream figures. A child-man and a fleshy, triumphant voluptee, in a glittering grove. This is not as awful as Mikhail Larionov’s “Self-Portrait,” in which he looks like a streaky, fanged skull, or Kirchner’s “Seated Female Nude,” like a starved seductive monkey—a come-hither smirk, a big red nipple, Get me out of here! 

It’s a relief to turn to Kandinsky’s “Portrait of Nina Kandinsky,” in which the artist’s wife is shown in shimmering colors, rain-washed and dissolving, only the strong contours of her face and neck remaining fully solid. Or Aleksandr Kuprin’s “Nude in a Hat with Green Ribbon,” which is right next to the horror-flick Kirchner and which shows a pretty lady in a cute pose. The conflicting angles of her body are balanced by her soft curves; the green of her ribbon is picked up in her breasts and belly, but the color never becomes corpsey or disturbing.

Of course, it’s possible to be too pretty. Vladimir Bekhteev’s 1910 “Bathing” shows idealized, slim lithe naiads in muted greens and lilacs, all curvy and shy. Like Artemis without the threat.

The final room shows completely abstract art: Kandinsky’s concise, dynamic shapes with their deep blacks and soft lilting colors; Malevich’s Suprematist sketches, which to me are too theoretical, just shapes, like he was doodling while bored on the phone.

“Russian Modernism” completely fulfills its mandate: It proves that these 10 years were fertile, full of experiments (not always successful, but what is?) and cross-pollinations. On one long wall there are photographs and capsule biographies of the artists. The Germans mostly saw their art condemned by the Nazis. Many of the Russians ended up in France. Goncharova went on to design for the Ballets Russes. Kandinsky died in France in 1944.

The Neue Galerie show captures a moment, the last moment before the transformation of modernity into the “short 20th century.”

Eve Tushnet is a TAC contributing editor, blogs at Patheos.com, and is the author of Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faith, as well as the author of the forthcoming novel Amends, a satire set during the filming of a reality show about alcohol rehab.