Matisse initially gained notice for her series of Missing Person paintings, in which she appropriated and embellished upon, or subtracted from, recognizable works from art history.
[2][6] In 1990, she relocated to Paris and attended the École des Beaux-Arts,[2][3] the same institution where her great-grandfather Henri Matisse had studied.
[6] In 1996, Matisse moved to New York City, creating her studio in Manhattan's Tribeca neighborhood, and soon began exhibiting her artwork.
[4] The artist's 1997 painting Monna Lisa (Be Back in Five Minutes)[4] initiated art world interest which furthered her career.
In the painting, Matisse replicated the background setting of Leonardo da Vinci's original, but omitted the eponymous subject Mona Lisa from the scene.
[4][6][9] The Be Back in Five Minutes series gave Matisse her first widespread exposure as an artist, in her own right, and informed her work for years thereafter.
[7][9] Artwork from this series was also assembled for an exhibition titled "Once Removed" at the upstate New York Katonah Museum of Art in the summer of 2005.
[4] The artist and her "Be Back in 5 minutes" series faced as much opposition as they did praise, with some critics deriding her "coloring-in" of Picasso by comparing it with the colorization of black and white movies.
Matisse's contribution was a "Be Back in 5 Minutes" interpretation of Gustave Courbet's erotic painting The Origin of the World, this time removing the 19th century French painter's graphically portrayed nude model, leaving only the rumpled bedsheets.
[10][14] Matisse once again appropriated historically significant artworks, this time superimposing her own imagery in the form of zebra stripes overlapping the originals.
In these paintings, all acrylics and oil on canvas, the appropriated originals are somewhat obscured by the stripes, rendering them less readily identifiable,[6] and the artist herself has joked that her dyslexia may have been helpful in creating these works.
Additionally, Matisse collaborated with @byKilian in December 2009 on 15 hand-painted, Special Edition (Gold) perfume bottles, which were sold to key By Kilian clients.
The decorated pianos remained at their specified locations for two weeks in July 2010, with the instructions "Play me, I'm yours" clearly marked, and an attendant present to oversee and invite passersby.
In 1992, when she was 27, Matisse married Pop artist Alain Jacquet, whom she had met during her years at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris.
Only by incidentally noticing her family name on museum walls did Sophie, as a young child, come to consider that her great-grandfather may have been someone "exceptional".
[6][12] Matisse's step-grandfather was the artist Marcel Duchamp, who reinterpreted Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa in his L.H.O.O.Q.
[1] Art writers have pointed to the "visual jokes" sometimes apparent in Matisse's own work as a sign of Duchamp's influence.