Matisse was not always certain though about the role of his cut-outs as independent works of art. "The walls of my bedroom are covered with cut-outs," he wrote to a friend, "I still don't know what I'll do with them." What he did with some of them was to turn them into a limited edition book, Jazz (1947), which contained 20 cut-outs related to the circus, the theatre and myth among other themes but, as the title suggests, was really about the idea of artistic improvisation. The Tate show includes the original cut-outs alongside the finished book. 

He also used them to return to the naked form. His "Blue Nudes" of 1952 are not only silhouettes that he traced sinuously with his scissors but a return to the art of his youth when, along with Picasso, he had been influenced by African carvings and indeed in 1907 had produced a painted Blue Nude.

The cut-outs reached their apotheosis as designs for the stained-glass windows of the Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence. The commission came about through his close friendship with Monique Bourgeois, who had nursed him in 1941 and later took orders as a Dominican nun, Sister Jacques-Marie. Matisse himself was an atheist but the chapel decorations and in particular the largely blue and yellow windows are sublime. The effect of thrumming colours and white walls carrying his simple outline drawings is numinous. 

Reaction to the chapel, completed after four years' work in 1951, was initially lukewarm. The press was more interested in the relationship between the artist and Sister Jacques-Marie, just as they were with his closeness to his beautiful young Russian helpmeet Lydia Delectorskaya. Matisse was above such nonsense. For a man in his eighties, frail but driven, the chapel was a project unlike any other. Not only did he largely finance it himself but it represented, he said, "an entire life of work". The effort of completing it exhausted him.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the Tate exhibition is that it allows the viewer to experience something of Matisse's physical world. The cut-outs were immersive, surrounding him in a way that paintings never quite did: Large Composition with Masks (1953), for example, is 10 metres long. And they are purely joyous works, unusual for an artist in late life. For someone who was used to judging the merit of his own work according to how much he had struggled with it, the cut-outs were an expression of release. There is no brooding in them, nothing maudlin or nostalgic but rather the happiness of finally achieving what he always wanted: they enabled him to acknowledge that at last "I have the mastery, I am sure of it."