The Matisse Cut-Outs is a show of true magnificence

Artists who live long enough to enjoy a late period of working will often produce art that is radically different from the achievements of the rest of their careers. Late Titian and late Rembrandt are two such remarkable final flowerings, but Henri Matisse (1869–1954) did something even more extraordinary: he not only changed direction, he also gave up painting entirely. In the last years of his life he concentrated exclusively on making pictures, some of them vast, from cut paper. If ill health prevented him from painting, it could not stop him creating, and he reached new heights of greatness in the breathtaking beauty and daringly simplified harmonies of his cut-outs. ‘I have attained a form filtered to the essentials,’ he said.

Expectedly, colour is the key to this new work, but the real truth of it lies in light. A spiritual light, perhaps, a light that is not a physical phenomenon, but exists in its extreme purity only in the artist’s brain — and then, when he is successful in his task, emanates from the work he produces. It is difficult not to be moved by the ability of the human spirit to flower in the face of imminent extinction. Matisse faced down appalling pain during the final decade of his life by continuing to work — it was his only hope and solace. In a ‘second life’ of borrowed time, he did ample justice to his reprieve from death by embarking on a blaze of creativity which gave rise to some of the most deeply joyous pictures ever made. The Tate has now gathered together some 130 works from this late period, securing unprecedented loans that mean that many of these cut-outs are being exhibited together for the first time. The result is a show (sponsored by Bank of America Merrill Lynch) of true magnificence.