Natalia Goncharova & Alexandra Exter is an episode of the series Hidden Treasures (15 × 5 mins) produced in 2006.

The National Gallery of Australia has more than 100,000 works in its collection—an extraordinary reservoir of creative vision and cultural history, from decorative arts to photography and sculpture.

Yet on a visit to the gallery, you’ll see only the tip of this iceberg. Carefully stored away are the things that can’t be placed on permanent display.

These unseen gems include works of exquisite fragility, from brilliant hand-painted fabrics to delicate works on paper. From Australia, the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Oceania, there are masks and carvings, lithographs and linocuts, set designs and stage costumes, sketchpads and handprinted books, marionettes and maquettes, teapots and textiles, and much, much more.

Now in this series of micro-docs, former director of the gallery Betty Churcher presents an insider’s guide to some of these 'hidden treasures’.

In the entertaining, accessible style for which she is renowned, Betty Churcher takes us behind the scenes, sharing with us her passion and insights. From her unique vantage point, she makes intriguing connections between a range of different objects and artists, linking them to the stories that surround them.

These are fascinating tales—about the works themselves, the people who created them and the challenge of preserving them—and a tantalising look at some of the ideas and influences that have shaped modern art across the globe.

A Film Australia National Interest Program in association with Early Works. Produced with the assistance of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

The Ballet Russe attracted artists to Paris from all over Europe but particularly from Russia. The impresario, Serge Diaghilev, had been barred from employment in any service to the Russian Crown after falling out with the Imperial Theatre in St Petersburg. Instead, he dedicated his talents to promoting the arts of Russia outside Russia and introducing the Russian avant-garde to Paris. Among the first he lured there was Natalia Goncharova.

The costumes she designed for his ballet Le Coq D’Or—now in the National Gallery of Australia’s collection—were exactly what he wanted. The saturated colours and bold designs became the trademark of his performances.

While other European modernists were looking to alternative traditions for their inspiration, to what they referred to as the 'primitive’ art of Africa and Oceania, Goncharova drew on her own. She looked to early Russian religious icons and folk art.

Around the time that Goncharova left Russia, Alexandra Exter was returning, keen to participate in the Bolshevik experiment of 1917. She too loved theatre design, believing it to be the most democratic and inclusive of the arts. However, her costumes were inspired by the abstract geometry of revolutionary Russian constructivism.

Among her work preserved in the National Gallery is her costume design for a Martian guard in the 1924 science-fiction film Aelita–The Queen of Mars, and two marionettes that were to take the place of actors in another silent film, where they were intended to epitomise the commercialism of streetlife in New York.

Although Exter died in poverty and obscurity in 1949, she still had the two marionettes with her, preserved as fond memories of her first flush of enthusiasm for the new order—a symbol of the optimism of those early days of the Russian Revolution.