“Matisse: The Fabric of Dreams – His Art and His Textiles,” the glorious and explosive show which opens today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, performs the amazing feat of showing us something new about Matisse.

First suggested by Matisse biographer Hilary Spurling, the traveling exhibition comprises approximately 45 painted works, including spectacular collections of Nice-period paintings and late cutouts, as well as 30 drawings and prints. Matisse’s artworks are displayed alongside roughly 60 stunning textiles – examples from the artist’s personal collection of printed and woven fabrics, rugs, wall hangings, and costumes from places such as Africa, Europe, India, Japan, and the Middle East. The show also includes “Maquette for Red Chasuble” (1950-52), a vestment used in the Matisse Chapel, and an exquisite costume for Diaghilev’s ballet “Le Chant du rossignol” (1919-20), a playfully stark, black-and-white, crinkled-felt robe and hood that resembles zebra hide.

Matisse (1869-1954) was born into a family – indeed, a whole region – of master weavers, and he collected gorgeous textiles from his poor student days onward. Part of the thrill of the exhibition is to be submerged in Matisse’s collection of exotic and couture clothing and fabrics. In the second gallery, these fill a whole wall in a staggered, floor-to-ceiling arrangement that conjure up something between an altar and a bazaar.

It is a thrill to experience the qualities of these fabrics. A pierced and appliqued hanging from north Africa produces a vibrating shadow-play of shapes against a wall. A Persian silk ikat, whose threads are tie-dyed before weaving, becomes a blurry, Impressionist shudder. You see the same kind of shudder and color vibration in the art of Matisse.

“Matisse: The Fabric of Dreams” is one of the most magical exhibitions I have seen at the Met. The show magnificently demonstrates by example Matisse’s taste and genius, his range of artistic invention, and what he may have learned from the structures, textures, and colors of textiles: how light plays off translucent silk; how forms can be folded, overlapped, and still be bound to the plane; or how line and shape can move fluidly and flit between flatness and volume, between pattern and organic movement, between internally held form or vein and external body or boundary. It also illuminates Matisse’s profound journey toward translating and transforming the decorative qualities of textiles into painting.

In the third gallery, two tall, vertical North African textiles hang on either side of an ogival archway. You can see through them into the next room, and they turn the wall into a recto/verso frame that allows you to see both sides of the hangings. The entire archway frames Matisse’s painting “Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Ground” (1926) – a bizarre work (hung on a distant wall in the next gallery) in which a volumetrically solid, totemic nude is in irreconcilable tension with the flat patterns of a Persian carpet and baroque wallpaper. To see the painting centered between the two textiles is startling, a dreamy, one-of-a-kind conflation of East and West. It gives us a sense of how Matisse lived with the textiles – how they fed his art.

The exhibition is organized around Ms. Spurling’s thesis that, throughout Matisse’s life, his art revolved around the textiles he collected. This gives the textiles both too much and too little credit. Her thesis is too art-historically pat, too reductive. The show is stupendous not only in its arrangement but also in its surprises and its pacing; it has the potential to yield so much that is important to the experience and understanding of Matisse. Its unfortunate wall text, however, encourages viewers to look for the “what” in the artist’s use of textiles as opposed to the “how.”

This approach runs the risk of suggesting Matisse’s influences in the paintings were limited to the textiles alone. The textiles thus become merely colorful props of inspiration rather than abstract muses that led Matisse, through the liberation of line, space, and color, to become a bridge – equally if not more important than Cubism – between representation and abstraction.

In the first gallery, for instance, we encounter a piece of blue-and-white, flower-printed fabric, purchased by Matisse in 1903,that Ms. Spurling suggests was the inspirational spark that set off this powder keg of innovation. It is the same cloth we can see in the nearby “Still Life With Blue Tablecloth” (1909), and in the groundbreaking painting “Harmony in Red” (1908), which is not at the Met.

Certainly, Matisse loved the piece of kimono-shaped fabric, in which a repeating decorative pattern of blue flower baskets and twisting, leafy vines paradoxically open up as they emphatically assert the flatness of the white ground. Yet it is important to remember that it is not the cloth that cuts the artist but the artist, always, who cuts the cloth.

Until September 25 (1000 Fifth Avenue, at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).