THE history of world art shows that it is easier to represent dystopias than utopias — hell looks fascinatingly horrific while heaven looks insipidly smug. This was especially true for 20th-century modernists who, in rejecting Renaissance idealisation, preferred mediaeval gargoyles to Raphael’s angels.

So Henri Matisse (1869-1954), who first exhibited in 1901, was doubly unusual in pioneering modernism while also taking joie de vivre as his main theme. Nowhere more so is that the case than in his cut-outs, to which Tate Modern’s exhibition pays due homage. 

They first saw the light of day in 1937 when Matisse cut out sketched motifs so that he could shift them around on a painting to help decide its composition. He soon expanded this technique by experimenting with cut-out shapes and colours when designing sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes. 

By 1943 he realised the technique’s full potential as a medium in its own right when studying the cut-out models for the illustrations to his artist’s book Jazz. Many of its images such as Icarus are now famous. 

This led to his large “stand-alone” cut-outs such as Zulma of 1950, made in his final years when illness and mobility problems made physically demanding easel painting difficult. By covering entire walls of his studio and bedroom with cut-outs in progress he could immerse himself in them as if in his garden.

Nature was his subject, movement his theme. Seaweed and fish weave under water and acanthus leaves wave in the breeze while dancers, swimmers, acrobats and monkeys stretch, bend, leap, tumble or recline with exuberant physical pleasure.

Nowadays Matisse, and especially his cut-outs, are universally loved but this was not always so. When first created works such as his now famous Blue Nudes (1952) shocked or baffled many with their blank, featureless faces, thickened necks and toeless and fingerless limbs. 

Their stark elegance, now so much admired, rests on the suppression of detail and flatness which the cut-out technique helps to create. 

The two films accompanying the exhibition which show Matisse at work reveal the surprisingly large tailoring or wallpaper shears which he used. These glide through the paper in sharp clean lines, leaving no ragged edges as normal scissors do. Half a century’s experience of drawing, including rigorous Ecole de Beaux Arts life-drawing classes, enabled Matisse to “draw” with these shears. Cutting the required flat shapes with fluid assurance and accuracy he arrived at the essence of his subjects.

A similarly lengthy experience of using colour led him to insist on hand-painted papers to achieve a wide variety of colours, shades and intensities. 

The visible brush marks give a subtle liveliness and variety to the surfaces which ready printed papers do not have. He used gouache, a water-based, opaque medium which keeps the purity and resonance of pure pigment in a way difficult to attain with oil paint.

Asking his assistants to move the shapes around the walls until he was satisfied with the compositions allowed Matisse to work on a large scale despite his physical limitations. The effects are breathtaking.

The simplicity is deceptive. There is always a surprise — a missing foot, the Madonna’s blank face, awkward angles among fluid shapes, “clumsily” shaped limbs or daringly “empty” spaces in the compositions, as well as unexpected colour juxtapositions such as moody puce coupled with zinging pink. 

These dissonances within overall harmonies create the tension which lift Matisse’s cut-outs beyond pleasurable seduction into meaningful art.

A surprisingly large number were design commissions for textiles, carpets, stained glass windows, tiled interior decorations and covers for avant garde magazines. His book Jazz and his designs for the chapel at Vence, whose entire interior he decorated, are given a room each. 

Matisse’s designs are a reminder that the supposed rift between the “pure” and “applied” arts was not as clear cut in the 20th century as mainstream art history, with its elitist focus on the former, suggests. 

Beautifully curated, the exhibition assembles 130 cut-outs from around the world and explains their development from humble design aids to stunning, immersive late works such as The Parakeet And The Mermaid which is 3.7 metres tall and almost 7.7 metres wide. 

Some commentators are astonished that such joyful works were made by an aged, ill person. 

But Matisse’s late cut-outs show that it is precisely the seriously ill who often value life’s simple pleasures — the shape of a leaf, a bird in flight — with greater intensity than the healthy. 

The exhibition’s only drawback is its price. A top price of £16.30 for adults “without gift aid donation” and £30 “for a quieter viewing experience” will sadly exclude the many. Yet if you can go you’ll come out with a spring in your step.  

Henri Matisse: The Cut Outs, runs at Tate Modern, London, until September 7. Box office: (020) 7887-8888.