Channelling childhood experiences of circus acts

with dancing bodies and organic forms,

Matisse created his cut-outs -

childlike images that bound and leap

with the rhythms and energy of life.

He's working now like a paper sculptor,

almost as if he's creating

the ultimate illustrated children's book.

But he's carving directly into colour.

He's letting this blazing colour actually build the forms.

And he's working very, very fast.

It's all exuberant, spontaneous instinct.

These lines leap and bound

and loop and somersault over the space.

The space itself is filled

with a kind of extraordinary animation.

The speed and the freedom is such

that he'd never been able to do when he was painting.

And you have the sense that he feels

painting is too studious and laborious.

And what the cut-outs

are a great uncorking of creative energy.

It's as though there's some sort of electricity

that's now pulsing and surging through those old hands of his.

If it seems as though they were created in a wash of pleasure,

the truth was very different.

It was 1943. France was occupied.

Matisse was distraught.

His family in peril.

There, blazingly lit, are the bombs of WWII.

There, too, amidst the jumps for joy,

the fragile bodies and bleeding hearts.

Allusions, perhaps, to Matisse's miraculous survival

from surgery for cancer of the bowel.

But this was resistance from the wheelchair,

the life-force in a mist of death.