Original subtitles

Modern art - it sells for a fortune in exclusive galleries,

but what's it ever done for us?

Has it influenced the clothes that we wear?

Or the buildings that we live in?

The cars that we drive?

The books we read to our children?

Even the way that we think?

I am Alistair Sooke and I earn a living writing about art,

and in this series I'm going to explore the life and work

of four titans of the 20th century.

Henry Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol.

They all changed their world, but have they changed ours?

This week, Matisse.

The first time I saw a picture by the French artist Henri Matisse,

I was just a kid.

It was one of his famous Blue Nudes,

incredibly simple, just one colour

with no detail at all, a bit like a primitive cave painting.

But something about it fascinated me then, and still does.

And since shops like IKEA

began selling posters of it, it's everywhere.

In student flats,

pizza houses,

my local gym,

and even my granny's got one.

But Matisse didn't always paint simple, bold pictures like his blue nude.

He began his career as a really traditional painter.

He started with intricately crafted still lifes,

then things got much more colourful,

then a lot less detailed,

and finally he gave up with detail altogether

and went with pure shape and colour.

He's often called "The Master of Colour", and some say he created the way our modern world looks.

But how, and why,

did he go from this to this?

Should we really be grateful that he did?

I've come to where Matisse was born around 140 years ago.

This is north-eastern France, on the edge of the Flanders Plain.

It is not far from where Matisse grew up.

I am struggling to think how this place produced Matisse,

a man who is known for his sensational use of colour.

This is Bohain, the town where Matisse grew up.

All fairly unremarkable,

definitely not picture-postcard France.

And his parents, far from being artists, were seed merchants.

So this is where he lived.

I think it might just deserve a picture.

Young Henri next to the man with the 'tache...

and me!

Matisse was born in 1869, and this is where he grew up.

This is the commercial entrance to his parents' seed store, and they all lived just upstairs.

By his own account, when he was young, he was a bit of a dreamer.

He didn't really know what he wanted to do - he didn't want to take over the family business,

which really disappointed his dad. He certainly didn't think he wanted to be an artist.

This is what's left of the view from what's thought to have been Matisse's bedroom.

He used to gaze out at the courtyard below, dreaming of escape

from his dreary life.

This space, if this was his room,

witnessed one of the most important transformations

in the history of art when Matisse spent many months bedridden.

He had a breakdown, he thought it was appendicitis but some people say it was depression.

Matisse was then 19, and was nursed by his mother, Anna.

She worked in the family seed store, which also sold house paints that she mixed herself,

She worked in the family seed store, which also sold house paints that she mixed herself,

and she changed his life by giving him a gift to cheer him up -

a paintbox.

He later said, "From the moment I held that box of colours in my hand,

"I knew that this was my life.

"Like an animal that plunges headlong towards what it loves,

"I dived right in."

It was a sort of paradise found,

and Matisse was on his way.

There may not have been much art in Bohain, but Matisse's childhood

was saturated with colour.

The town was then a textile manufacturing centre, famous for its vibrant, patterned cloth.

Bohain's factories are long gone, but nearby one is still going,

supplying lace to fashion houses from Chanel to Louis Vuitton.

LOOMS RATTLE RHYTHMICALLY

This would have been the soundtrack to Matisse's childhood.

In the dying plant, yarns are drenched in great vats of colour.

I am really starting to understand where Matisse that he's got that extraordinary sense of colour from.

As a kid he must have seen colours exactly like these, bright, bold hues, every hue under the sun.

Wandering through here feels a bit like walking through the factory of his imagination.

But Matisse's later love affair with colour wasn't apparent in this,

his very first painting.

Made within just a year of picking up a paintbrush,

it shows incredible natural talent, but it's very subdued.

But in 1890, muted, sombre works like this were the established, mainstream style

of European painting, which had faithfully recorded the appearance

of reality for hundreds of years.

Monet and the Impressionists had begun a rebellion.

They discarded meticulous representation to capture instead their impressions of a scene.

They began to use brighter colours, too.

Stuck in Bohain, Matisse wouldn't have seen their work,

but he was about to head to the centre of the art world, Paris.

When Matisse left for Paris in the early 1890s to train as an artist,

no-one round here could have dreamt what was going to happen, not even Matisse.

'His still-life with books had hardly set the world alight.

'Nor did Woman Reading, painted a few years later, in Paris.'

While studying, Henri spent six years trying to copy this -

it's a painting of a fish and a cat by Chardin... Producing this!

I think I prefer the one by Chardin.

Matisse held some wild parties, played the violin a lot,

shot at fishermen with a pea-shooter...

He fell in love with his model,

Camille, who bore him a daughter...

But then, he fell in love with someone else - Amelie, and married her instead.

Amelie bore him two sons, and brought up his daughter.

He painted this, in 1897.

He'd clearly discovered impressionism.

And this in 1904, more colourful,

but still not wholly original.

But the biggest breakthrough happened not in Paris, but in the south of France.

To be honest, I can't wait to get there.

In 1905, Matisse travelled south,

on the journey that transformed his art and his life.

He was in his mid-30s, broke, with three kids.

He'd worked furiously for 15 years, as he put it,

"Like a drunken brute, trying to kick the door down",

but he still hadn't found his own voice.

Matisse said about his early years in Paris that when he was young,

he felt a bit like someone stumbling about in a dark wood, with no clear idea of where he was heading,

which in a sense isn't quite true, because he really knew that above all he needed to paint.

That was absolutely his vocation.

He was completely certain about it when he told his wife, Amelie,

"Mademoiselle, I love you dearly but I shall always love painting more."

Quite an astounding thing to say, really.

I have just got engaged, and I don't think I could get away with saying

something like that, and hope to keep in the relationship.

Henri, and Amelie, must've wondered if this fierce obsession would ever lead to anything other than poverty.

But something about the south of France changed everything.

This is the small fishing town of Collioure on the Mediterranean coast in France.

It is so far south, it is almost in Spain. Just look around...

The first thing that really strikes you is the very brilliant quality

of the light, and the strong, powerful, very saturated colours.

These were things that Matisse was always searching for.

Matisse was staggered by the intensity of what he saw and felt here.

And the radical way he chose to capture it on canvas

would horrify the art establishment.

To discover why, I'm meeting Matisse expert Alistair Wright.

This is where he painted one of the great paintings of that summer.

This is the Roofs of Collioure, from 1905.

It was around this time that he started quoting

that a kilogram of green is greener than half a kilogram of green.

What Matisse took that to mean is that if you want your colours to seem intense you have to use more of them.

You can't break them up into small areas, you have to put on

a big slab of red if you want it to really sound as red in the painting.

He started to use colours in ways that have ever been done before in the history of Western painting.

I think, for him, it is a fragile moment.

He is scared,

he doesn't know what he is doing. Matisse's blocks of wild colour

barely resembled the real world and broke every established rule.

Over centuries, the craft of painting had been refined.

There were conventions of light,

shadow, perspective and imperceptible brushwork.

But to capture his feelings about Collioure,

Matisse decided to ignore all that.

Can you believe that this is one of the settings for a great turning-point in modern art?

It is a non-descript setting.

This is where it all began to change. This used to be a cafe, did it?

It was. It was a cafe and Matisse rented a room above it.

This was the window that he opened...

This is the room that he rented in Collioure for the summer.

It is from here that he painted The Open Window.

The first thing that strikes me is that you look out and it doesn't look anything like that painting.

He transformed what he saw.

The colours become elements that he can arrange on the canvas

without reference to what is out there in reality.

Those colours can then sing together.

Van Gogh's generation had started to free colour from simply imitating what we see.

But no-one had gone anything like as far as Matisse.

So you have brought along this colour wheel. It looks very pretty.

What is it? What does it tell us about Matisse?

This is the colour wheel that Matisse himself knew.

It was put together in the 1830s by a scientist called Chevreul,

who had investigated the way the human eye sees colour.

Complementary colours were colours from opposite sides of the wheel.

Green is the complement of red, orange was the complement of blue...

What happened with the preceding generation of painters from Matisse, they became very interested in this.

The colour combination that they became particularly interested in

was yellow and blue. What Matisse does is move around the colour wheel.

Instead of working with primarily with yellow and blue highlights, he starts working with green and red.

As they are put together on the canvas, they jar...

He very quickly becomes the number one bad boy of French painting. All of the critics know his work.

They all know they don't like it but they know they have to take him seriously.

They have a sense that this is where painting is going in the future.

Next the "bad boy" produced an extraordinary portrait of his wife, Amelie.

Its primitive simplicity and impulsive strokes of jarring, ferocious colour

were another attack on the traditional rules of painting.

Matisse was rubbished for painting like a "fauve", French for "wild animal".

His next creation wasn't only dazzling and primal, it was vast...

nearly ten feet across!

Over the next five years, his paintings continued to push the boundaries of form and colour,

by portraying an emotional response

to reality rather than merely replicating the external world.

Most French collectors considered Matisse a lunatic,

but luckily for his bank balance,

a Russian textile magnate began buying his work in bulk.

To find out more, I've come to St Petersburg.

Matisse came here to Russia in 1911.

He was invited by one of his great patrons, the super-wealthy Moscow industrialist Sergei Shchukin.

Shchukin was quite a mysterious, larger-than-life character.

He was loaded with cash and he used to travel the world searching for objects of great beauty.

He was really into contemporary art, the Charles Saatchi of his day.

In 1906, he bought his first Matisse.

I am on my way, in this boxy Russian taxi, to meet a writer who knows more than anyone about Shchukin -

His biographer Natalia Semenyova.

He was one of the richest men in Russia.

He was wealthy textile businessman.

One of the most interesting figures in Moscow culture life at the beginning of the century.

Is this his house? This is his palace.

Yes. It's his palace.

Is it all Matisse? All Matisse.

It was a Matisse salon. It was one story that when he invited somebody and showed them his Matisses,

Old merchants said, "One madness paints them and another madness buys them."

One madman painted them and another madman bought them?

Yes. He bought 37 pieces of Matisse.

We could say that he was the greatest art collector of the 20th century.

Nobody compared with him.

Today, most of Shchukin's collection has ended up here, at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

It's the most breathtaking art gallery in the world.

Before the Russian Revolution, this was a palace for the Tsars.

Now, its home to art the Communists liberated from the ruling class.

This is the centrepiece of the museum's Matisse collection,

two vast paintings he made for Shchukin in 1910.

I find these two works on either end of this room, Music to my left and Dance to my right,

utterly, utterly astonishing.

They're just like nothing else you have seen in a museum, ever. Look at this.

It has got so much energy bound up

in the paint, it is a painting about the joy of being alive.

These people are stamping, they are dancing, they are whirling.

Out of something so simple, just using three basic colours,

he summons this intense vision, which is just enormous.

Simple, almost childish figures,

blazing, unrealistic colour...

At first, even Shchukin was horrified - so was everyone else.

When they were first shown in Paris

in 1910, people thought, "What on the earth are we looking at?"

It was just simple barbarism.

They mocked the tones of the flesh

and said, "Look at Matisse's lobster men frolicking amongst the spinach."

They felt that these paintings

violated everything that anyone had ever established within art history

about beauty, about order, about clarity and about harmony.

What Matisse recognised is that colours don't work in isolation,

they always work in terms of how they interact with those around them.

Matisse once said that he wanted all his colours to sing together,

he wanted the effect to be like a chord in music.

Many other Matisse paintings from this time are also big and shockingly bright.

They eventually came to the Hermitage after Shchukin's collection

was confiscated by the Communists in 1918.

But later, the Russian dictator Stalin banned the lot,

as he found Matisse decadent.

Nobody saw them for decades.

Shchukin once wrote to Matisse.

He said, "The public is against you, but the future is yours".

And having seen the paintings here, you just cannot doubt that he was absolutely right.

These works have inspired countless other painters to use colour to explore and express

their inner emotions rather than simply imitate the physical world.

Among them is one of Britain's foremost abstract artists,

Albert Irving, who I've come to meet.

Hello. Hello. You must be Albert.

Hello. Nice to meet you.

Well, look at this one. Glorious colour.

This must be influenced by Matisse.

Yes. You've spotted it immediately.

He's meant a very great deal to me.

When I first started painting abstract paintings it had to be dark.

Rembrandt was God and all the great art was dark brown.

Matisse revealed how you can assemble

high key colours and make an important painting.

You're courting danger with primary colours.

Because you're likely to finish up with the thing looking like a disco.

So, you always paint like this, do you? On the floor?

Not on the floor. On these tins.

Like Jamie Oliver, this, isn't it? Chuck in a bit of water...

Oh, my God. This is going to splash.

Colour kind of changes.

Yeah, I know. There's a lot of energy in that.

I'd like to think so, yeah.

How about now?

I think Matisse would be rather pleased. It would be nice if he was.

Giving me his blessing. And today,

it's not only artists who appreciate

how brilliantly Matisse balanced colour and complex patterns.

Welcome to lots of textile, colour, and pattern. God, it's gorgeous!

I'm meeting Tricia Guild, founder of home furnishing company, The Designers Guild.

Matisse would have been like a kid in a sweet shop.

It feels like the interior of one of his paintings.

In this painting, which seems completely balanced and calm,

there's fabric on the walls, patterned carpet, a patterned rug,

and then these two children

in a gorgeous little stripe.

But the whole effect is harmonious.

I can't quite work out how he manages to make such disparate things cohere.

If you just use masses of colour without any relief, without black,

white, or neutral organic colours, it becomes too much.

I mean, if we look at all these very strong colours and use them

with some black and white,

suddenly, they're more balanced and, at the same time, more alive.

And that's something that Matisse did.

Nearly every painting, you will see black and white.

Since I was a child, it's always Matisse that I look at.

It opens a world, somehow.

I always felt if I could do that in my work, then I would feel really good about it.

When you're really pushing for something extra special, it's not easy.

But easy is boring,

we don't do boring.

So, Matisse inspired brighter colours in our homes,

and also modern art, that uses colour to convey emotion.

His art is a response to life, portraying his feelings about the world around him.

Experience was always at the core of Matisse's work, and travel never failed to inspire him.

He was a great one for sending postcards home from the places he visited.

Here he is writing home from Tahiti.

And here he is swimming. He spent weeks diving underwater amazed by what he saw.

Here he is in 1912, on a horse in Morocco.

And here is the cafe where he sketched the violinist and played to the customers himself.

And here are the locals having a smoke.

And here's the painting it became, the 'Moroccan Cafe',

two faceless men watching two goldfish by a flower.

The eruption of the First World War halted Matisse's travels.

He tried to enlist but was rejected because he was too old.

So he returned to painting.

This painting is called The Piano Lesson and it was done in 1916.

What you see is Matisse's son Pierre, being forced to practise the piano under duress.

Have a look at his face. He's really not enjoying this at all.

I think that's why the whole painting is really dominated by this grey colour,

as the emotional state of poor old Pierre, who said many years later,

"You can't believe how much I detested those piano lessons,"

is summed up in that flat, monochrome, boring old grey.

You know, we all think of Matisse as being this master of sumptuous colour.

But here, there's a real anxiety to the painting.

The oppressive sense that this painting conjures

is encapsulated in that wedge which plunges into his son's head.

In an indirect way, this isn't just about

his son playing the piano, this is a painting about the First World War.

That green is a vision of Eden which has been lost. It's a paradise lost.

This is a lament for all of the lost youth of France.

That's why Pierre, who was much older at the time

the painting was made, has been made to look so young.

This is really saying that all of these poor kids that were being sent

to the front were dying in their hundreds of thousands.

It's a very, very vicious image

but one that is, from a painting perspective, totally successful.

So Matisse could touch on tragedy and despair

as well as peace, joy and beauty.

He was always full of surprises, and once the war was over in 1918,

he wrong-footed the art world all over again.

Nice, on the French Riviera.

In Matisse's day, a city of film studios, gamblers and hotels for the idle rich.

A world away from Paris,

where serious, cutting-edge artists were supposed to live.

Matisse arrived here in Nice at the end of 1917, hoping to recover

from a bout of bronchitis.

It rained every day for a month, until he was thoroughly sick of the place and decided to leave.

Then, of course, the very next day, the clouds disappeared,

and all of a sudden, the city was drenched in crisp southern sunlight, just like today.

Matisse fell in love with this light, and stayed. This is one of the hotels he stayed in.

He had everything he needed here.

Warmth, light, fantastic views of the ocean...

He swam in the ocean, even won a medal for rowing in it,

but he didn't paint it much, unless glimpsed through windows.

Because, for the next 12 years,

he spent much of his time indoors,

painting semi-naked women.

His models posed as concubines in a sultan's harem waiting for sex,

or relaxing after it.

He wasn't the first to explore this exotic subject matter.

French artists had been doing it for more than 100 years.

It was a tradition called the odalisque.

Unsurprisingly, Matisse's erotic odalisques sold rather well,

making him increasingly wealthy.

But they're not exactly revolutionary.

Some people thought that the wild beast of modern art

had lost his roar.

It was Matisse's first trip to America that finally brought an end to his obsession with odalisques.

And, in many ways, it's here, in the end, that his work has had the biggest influence of all.

Matisse only got to New York quite late life, in 1930, when he was 60.

But he was staggered by its energy and said it took 20 years off him.

He's always portrayed as this old fogey, but it's just not true.

He loved the Big Apple, the ice-cream sodas and the traffic on Park Avenue.

And most of all, he loved the skyscrapers and what he described

as the "crystalline light" high above them.

He even took a trip right to the top of the Empire State Building,

which was then the tallest man-made structure in the world.

Matisse said he would've settled here if he'd discovered New York

when he was younger.

But ultimately, some of his greatest works have settled here instead.

Like this one, painted earlier in his career.

This is one of my out-and-out favourite paintings in the world.

It's called the Red Studio and Matisse did it in 1911.

Very autobiographical work.

What you're looking at is a vision of Matisse's studio.

Perspective has been removed and destroyed.

Instead, he's creating something where all these different objects seem to just be floating.

They're not anchored to space at all. They're just sort of...

It's like they are actually in a liquid.

And there, in the middle, is a grandfather clock

and the key thing about that is it hasn't got any hands at all.

Matisse is suspending time here so that we sort of plunge into that deep red colour.

After many years hanging in a London night club,

it was bought by New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1949.

As soon as it was on display, it had a huge impact

on an emerging school of artists here in America.

They were the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s.

One of the most famous, Mark Rothko,

started painting like this

after gazing at The Red Studio

until he was moved to tears.

He said all his painting was born from months

spent looking at that Matisse.

And this, which looks a lot like '50s Abstract Expressionism,

is actually a window painted back in 1914 by Henri Matisse.

While in America in 1930, Matisse was commissioned

to create an enormous painting

that would spark a whole new phase of extraordinary innovation.

An American multi-millionaire art collector called Albert C Barnes

invited him to make a massive mural for his newly built museum.

Returning to Nice, Matisse hired an old film studio and set to work.

I'm about to see the space where Matisse actually made

this whopping great mural for the very demanding Dr Barnes.

It's just in here.

Barnes wanted a mural 12ft high and 45ft long,

stretching across three alcoves.

You get a sense of scale immediately.

This is where Matisse hung the three canvases.

It was the biggest thing he'd ever attempted, and he felt liberated.

He had a stick of charcoal which he tied to the end of a large bamboo pole

and he started just sketching very fluidly the forms of the dancers

who'd be the subject of this mural, up against the wall, like this.

There was a friend who came along and watched him do his work

and said this bamboo pointer was a bit like a magician's wand.

With the Barnes mural, Matisse developed a pared-down,

distinctively modern style

which would dominate his work for the rest of his life.

But when the mural was finally installed,

Dr Barnes inexplicably hid it from public view.

Matisse never saw his Dancing Nudes again.

One of the assistants Matisse hired to help him on the mural was Lydia Delectorskaya.

She was very young, only in her early twenties,

glamorous and good looking with long golden hair and blue eyes.

She was Russian, a film extra here in Nice. And slowly but surely,

she would become the most important woman in Matisse's life, for the rest of his life.

Lydia's arrival ultimately brought an end to Matisse's 42-year marriage to Amelie.

He began a painting of his new young love, Lydia, in 1935.

Photos show it taking shape as he pulled and stretched her naked body

searching for the right image.

The Pink Nude of 1935.

Vibrant colour, simple design,

distorted yet harmonious.

Totally modern.

This was the visual equivalent of a love poem.

Whether or not they were lovers, I don't know.

But it really doesn't matter because this painting embodies such feeling for Matisse.

Matisse by now was in his mid-60s, yet here he was,

all of a sudden, rejoining the ranks of the avant garde.

Whatever harmony Matisse had found with Lydia was soon disrupted,

when the Nazis invaded France in 1940.

Later that year, he was diagnosed with bowel cancer,

undergoing major surgery in 1941.

"Give me three or four years to finish my work,"

he pleaded to the doctors. He was nursed by Lydia

and together they moved to the town of Vence

10 miles outside Nice.

This was Matisse's house in Vence.

It was built for an English admiral and it was called and Villa Le Reve, which meant "the dream".

Matisse moved here in about...

I think it was 1943. He was scared of Allied bombing in Nice where he'd been living in hotel rooms.

Lydia found this place and organised the move over here.

In many ways, this house is quite unassuming, quite humble.

Picasso came to visit Matisse here and the first time he came,

he couldn't believe the great French artist lived in his place.

He went up the road because he saw a more picturesque villa and was told by a neighbour,

"No, no. Henri? He's back that way."

When Matisse lived here, he was incredibly weak.

It was still only a couple of years after his operation for bowel cancer when he really nearly died.

But here he found a new lease of life.

He felt every day of was a gift of new life for his work.

He had this surge of energy to create a new body of art that was going to be incredibly important.

It's not a private home any more. They run art courses here.

I'm going to meet someone called Jilly Ballantyne, who's the current artist in residence.

Was this Matisse's bedroom?

This was Matisse's bedroom it wasn't his bed.

But he did sleep at this end, apparently.

There are photographs that show that.

Then there was a space through to another room,

which is now blocked off, where he did most of his work,

where his birds were and all his chairs and objects.

He had quite a house full, I think, of people to help him.

Lydia included. I've got pictures, actually, of Lydia.

He must have really relied on her in these years because he was very frail by now.

She took care of his every need. She was his art assistant, his model.

There's a real expression, so much concentration, a kind of tenderness of love. She must have loved him.

Yes, I think she must have loved him enormously.

Here he is with a model.

But he's studying her so intently. He looks so professorial there,

like a scientist in his white coat.

He's got a very stern expression on his face. Very studious.

Staring straight at the mid-part of the naked model.

This is a very rare photograph of Matisse actually smiling.

People say in private he could be a real joker and raconteur. He was obviously very charming.

It was in this house in his late 70s that Matisse painted some of his most intense and vivid works.

When these were shown in New York in 1949,

Matisse was acclaimed as the greatest living painter.

It was also here that the sick and elderly Matisse came up with

one of his most shocking and radical innovations of all.

The paper cut-out.

No more drawing lines and filling in shapes with colour,

simply cut out and apply colour directly.

Increasingly bed-bound, the technique allowed him

to continue his creative outpouring.

This is one of his most famous cut-outs, of Icarus,

a character from Greek mythology

who plunges to his death after flying too close to the sun.

Criticism can be made of Matisse's more simple work,

that a child could have done that. So we'll get to you to do it.

Can I cheat by looking at it? I don't know. Do you think we'll let you cheat?

That probably shouldn't be there. Turn it over then.

And the masterpiece begins.

These are very modern scissors you're using. Very sharp.

Oh yeah, I've got an advantage. He's got long metal sheers.

You need to be incredibly confident.

Each cut...you have to be totally sure where you're going.

I think that's where the likening it to sculpture is really the truth.

I mean, you cut into a piece of marble.

If you make a really bad judgment, you've lost a whole block of marble.

When you try it yourself,

you then realise it's not as easy as he makes it look.

This looks like a piece of road kill next to that.

He's got much thicker thighs

and I've given myself a massive a beer belly.

A torso, surely! SHE LAUGHS

The inclination of the head and the general...

it's got a feeling of defeat.

The weight is all at the bottom of Icarus's body

and he's descending, he's coming down.

There's a resignation about it.

The inevitability of what's going to happen.

What we forget is that we have this knowledge, this graphic language that we know. We understand.

Everything we use, everything we touch, has a logo

or an icon that represents something.

This, at the time, was so shocking, it was so bold.

This deceptively simple style Matisse pioneered still feels new and fresh today.

It's everywhere.

From the iPod ads, to blue jeans.

From the Olympic logo

to the Festival of India.

Matisse is still very much around.

One of the few people alive who saw him making the cut-outs is French painter Francoise Gilot,

who first visited Matisse in 1946 with Picasso

when she was Picasso's lover.

We rang the bell and then, something that surprised me enormously,

that everything was in the dark.

Lydia, his secretary, takes us to the room

where Matisse was in his bed.

That room was the only one where there was natural light.

Cut with large scissors, I couldn't believe the scissors were that large

and with great skill, he would do whatever shape he wanted.

He did that very fast, with dynamism.

He just went in a very spontaneous manner. It was creation itself.

He had reached a moment in his life

when he was at one in his mind and his body, so it was...

that's why he could be at last spontaneous, I think.

Matisse was great because he had the audacity of simplicity, always.

To reduce things to the most simple possible way.

Many of the most famous cut-outs were made for a book called Jazz,

which contained about 20 of them alongside comments by Matisse on art and life.

Only 250 copies of Jazz were originally published.

And one is now in London's Victoria and Albert Museum.

Matisse came here in 1898 when he dragged his poor wife, Amelie,

around all the art galleries in London.

He could never have known that, over a century later, one of his works,

Jazz, would be one of this museum's most prized possessions.

The great thing is I don't just get to see it in a glass case,

they're actually going to let me read it.

Matisse explains his inspiration for Jazz in the introduction.

"These images, with their incredibly vibrant and violent colours,

"are...have come about as the crystallisation of memories of the circus,

"of folk tails, or of travel."

One of the important things about this book

is that Matisse was putting text which he had written himself.

It's rather messy, a bit scruffy, but it's nice because it lends

a whole feeling of airiness and spontaneity to the thing.

It also has this feeling of Matisse's...

his presence, really. It's as if he's just been penning this stuff and the ink's practically still wet.

Look at the bright colours.

You get that sense of when he was in Vence making the cut-outs,

and his niece oculist told him he needed to wear sunglasses when he went in his studio

because everything's so bright. This really is.

It immediately comes off the page.

What he's doing is creating something that's so stripped back and pared down.

He's making these images soon after he'd recovered from

a desperate bout of cancer which almost killed him.

This plate's called The Burial of Pierrot.

This is about the death and funeral of a clown.

This must be the cortege and so, right in the middle of it, you have this red form.

And throughout this book, you have these red dots.

Here's someone who's supposed to be dead and yet this is

a beating, exploding heart. And he's just joyous being reborn.

It's an acrobat or a trapeze artist flying through the air at the top of the circus.

It's almost like going from the black of before you're born, into the black of after you die.

The brief span we have before we go from one dark abyss into another.

And he's sort of defying that whole thing.

He's thumbing his nose at death. That's what the whole book is about.

What you see here in Jazz is a new vision.

About a decade after the operation, he looked back and saw it as a turning point.

He said that everything he'd done before felt a bit tight and constrained.

He said he felt like he'd been working as if he had his belt tightened.

But then he went on to say that only what he created after his illness

constitutes his real self, free and liberated.

Thanks particularly to his cut-outs, the Matisse look is much imitated.

And all sorts of products you wouldn't have thought of

are now jumping on the Matisse bandwagon.

This is an Orla Keily bag, clearly inspired by Matisse.

Nowadays, you can buy Matisse acrylic paints,

wash your dyed hair with Matisse shampoo,

before you put on your Matisse jumper

and wrap yourself up in a Matisse scarf.

Your dogs can chew on a rubber man called Henri in the shape of Icarus.

And your kids can cuddle their Miffy rabbit.

I bet you didn't know this, but if it wasn't for Matisse,

sweet little Miffy here wouldn't exist.

She may not be the artist's biggest gift to humankind,

but, without her, I think the world would be a poorer place.

Miffy comes from Utrecht in Holland.

The world famous bunny was created by Dick Bruna

after he was bowled over by Matisse's cut-outs.

I've read that Matisse has been such a big influence on you

that Miffy wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Matisse. No, I think so.

Yes. I think that's quite right.

It was, for me, something so special, the paper cuttings of Matisse.

I had in my head, when I'm going to make drawings now,

I try to make them as simple as possible.

And make the lines as simple as possible,

make the colours as simple as possible.

That's what Matisse has learned me and is still learning me.

I know YOU love Matisse. Yes. But what about Miffy? Does Miffy like Matisse as well? Yes, very much.

I show you. I've made a book about Miffy in a museum.

There are all different painters in it

and she says, yes, that's beautiful, that's Matisse.

She likes that very much.

Now, I can't help noticing that you've got this print. Oh, yes.

This print. This is a reproduction of Matisse.

And when you see this book, you can understand that I have been inspired, yes.

What you've actually done is you've turned the Matisse vegetable,

sort of leaf forms, into bunny's ears. Into rabbits.

Yes, yes.

I like that still better than all the wonderful paintings he did before.

When I see that, it makes me happy.

Extraordinarily, it was in the last years of his life, aged 83,

that Matisse made another audacious leap,

creating his famous work, The Snail

There's one thing that hits you above everything else

and that's the work's enormous scal

It's just huge, almost three metres by three metres.

It's playful, it's celebratory.

It feels fun, it's simple. It's almost childlike in its simplicity.

And it's really touching and beautiful

that it was created by someone who was so incredibly frail.

And he spent his days in this contraption which he wheeled around his studio, called the taxi bed.

And in the taxi bed, he picked up big bits of paper which were painted

these matte, flat, bold, vibrant colours

and he got a big pair of shears and he started hacking into them.

He said it was like drawing with colour.

And this is the result.

Matisse was obviously not just cutting.

It's as if he's there with the paper, just...

and then managing to kind of levitate

these enormous blocks of colour up in space.

He's pared something down, he's looking for simplicity, he's looking for the essence.

And, of course, most of all,

he's dealing in big, thick, saturated blocks of colour.

I'm convinced that it's the work of a modern master,

one who's still influencing the way we see the world around us today.

It's quite familiar, isn't it?

Matisse's snail has even crawled into the London 2012 Olympics logo.

Sometimes you could be forgiven for thinking,

that man, Matisse, he's everywhere!

And someone who knows all about tha is the leading British fashion designer, Sir Paul Smith.

Matisse, for me, is the boss of colour. The famous snail.

I've used it as inspiration for colour, stripes, pattern.

When you're playing with yarns, that's a nice striped sweater.

All the Matisse colours on one pair of shoes.

Often you think this colour and this colour work really well

but he'd sort of throw colours together

that maybe nobody had experimented with before.

He goes...and you're just like, wow, that's pretty brave.

That could be a bag, but the flap on the bag could be

in blue or something or a green.

I'm intrigued by this idea that when you started out

you looked at Matisse to show you how to use colour.

Yeah. Did the world seem quite black and white?

I've been doing it a long time, so I'm very old.

So when I started, men were mostly wearing very classical colours

and were still quite nervous about wearing a colourful sweater.

I'd just suddenly do a whole load of Matisse colours just nudging the British male into colour.

Do you ever wear anything that isn't Paul Smith? No, because it's free.

What else can I show you? Tie design. T-shirts.

Is this your notes for the beginning of a collection? Yes. Blue nudes.

I take some of the shapes from his other work,

colour from this work, then mixing them together.

If the boss did it, then it's good enough for me.

French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent was another big Matisse fan.

He even used to say that he wished he'd been Matisse.

His most notorious ad, for Opium perfume, featured Sophie Dahl as an odalisque.

Remember Matisse's naked concubines?

The billboard was so raunchy, it was quickly banned.

These weren't, though. Dresses by Yves Saint Laurent.

This is Matisse's Polynesia, The Sky.

It inspired a famous dress worn by a famous French woman.

Carla Bruni at World Cup '98.

Recognise the doves?

So Matisse is still very much in our world.

He's inspired countless painters, as well as fashion designers and interior designers.

You can see his influence in commercial logos and kids' cartoons.

Vibrant colour, simple, expressive shapes, less clutter, less detail.

More impact, more feeling.

Matisse pioneered the look of the modern world.

And right at the end of his life, when you'd think he could go no further,

he created something utterly unlike anything he'd done before.

Matisse was an atheist, or that's what everyone thought.

He once wrote, "My only religion is love of the work to be created and total sincerity."

But when recovering from the operation for bowel cancer,

he was nursed by a woman who later became a Dominican nun, Sister Jacques-Marie.

There was no chapel in her convent, just down the road from Matisse's home in Vence,

so to thank her for her care, he had one built,

designing it right down to the last detail.

This beautifully tranquil garden is the setting for the chapel

that Matisse designed right at the end of his life.

He called this place the crowning achievement of his entire career,

which is a completely extraordinary thing to say given that, first and foremost, he was known as a painter.

I've never visited it before and I'm just about to go inside and find out what it's like.

What an incredibly still and serene space this is.

This is the stations of the cross.

This is the agony of Christ.

It's an image of suffering which you never ever see in Matisse's art.

He has that at the back.

Opposite it is this beautifully colourful...

Look at this window, this is called The Tree Of Life.

And it's all about growth, with these patterns of leaves and foliage sprawling up.

And I think, just being here, that window repudiates that.

It says, "You know what? It doesn't all have to be agony and strife."

It's so appropriate he does this right at the end of his career.

Because look here, this is sunlight coming through, it's glowing.

All his life he tried to do this on canvas, with pigments that would really hit you.

But, in a way, none of them have a patch of this. This is just...

You could look at this all day.

This is a man who spent his life, foremost, painting, that's what he did.

And in this place, he's left oil paints behind entirely.

Instead, the substance he's working with, his material, is light.

Matisse said that all his life he was trying to create

a sense of calmness in his pictures, or in his art.

He said the reason was because he himself is in need of peace.

And I really relate to that.

I mean, I don't really know anyone who doesn't have moments of

anguish and anxiety and inner turmoil.

And he suffered from that throughout his life.

And in his work, he created something...

which eased that.

And what else can you ask of a great work of art?

Um...

I genuinely feel quite moved by it.

And...

..I think the reason is...

..that he was so old when he designed this place.

And...I find that phenomenal.

The fact that he had this kind of...

..final surge of creativity...

..just shortly before his death.

It's just so beautiful.

Matisse said, "Do I believe in God?

"Yes, when I work."

And, with this chapel, his work was done.

And his creations of simplicity and colour would change our world.

If you'd like to find out more about the art and the influence

of Matisse, Picasso, Dali and Warhol,

then go online to bbc.co.uk/modernmasters

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