but to the art of other, non-European traditions

in his search for a people's art of instinctive colour.

And it was the art of Islam that pulled him most strongly.

Visiting Tangier in 1912 and 1913,

Matisse saw that in Islamic culture, art was everywhere.

In the mosque, on the street, in carpets and clothes.

And in its sensuous embrace of decoration,

long written off by the West as an inferior genre,

Matisse saw the essence of a truly modern,

inclusively-universal art.

And so, while here, Matisse brought east and west together

by combining Islamic colour and decoration

with the iconography of Christian worship.

A triptych - three paintings hung together like an altarpiece.

On either side, portals to better, brighter worlds.

And in the centre, in the place of a Madonna,

a local girl enthroned in luminous blue/green.

Not quite the ultramarine of the virgin, but still.

When Matisse got back to France,

everything he'd experienced in Tangier,

the hot, glowing light,

the intense saturated colour he'd seen

on the clothes of people and on the walls of houses,

the graceful, flowing lines of Islamic ornamentation

all came together.

Not just to make an extraordinary ensemble of paintings,

but something that was completely unanticipated

in his work so far.

And, more importantly,

which would take art into a completely new place.

No artist had ever been taken seriously before using scissors

and coloured paper, but by the 1940s,

Matisse saw that the deceptive innocence of the form

was THE key to that universal language of colour

and flowing line he'd been hunting all his life.