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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The idea of making a copy of Picasso's "Guernica" as Matisse might have done it was suggested to Sophie Matisse by her dealer, Francis Naumann. Naumann is a bit of an art-world wise guy. He was the curator of "Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York," at the Whitney Museum, in 1996, and he is also an authority on Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, who happens to have been Sophie Matisse's step-grandfather; Duchamp married Alexina Matisse, known as Teeny, after she was divorced from Pierre Matisse, Henri Matisse's son.
Naumann is fifty-four, and Sophie, who is Matisse's great-granddaughter, is thirty-seven. They have known each other for almost twenty years, ever since Naumann paid a visit to Teeny Duchamp at her house in the country outside Paris. If you ask how Naumann and Sophie met, they tell different versions of the same story. Naumann, who was then an art historian, says that it was raining, and he was picked up at the train station by a svelte and alluring dark-haired young woman (Sophie), and that while they were driving to Teeny Duchamp's she turned to him and said (provocatively, he thought), "Are you the adventurous type of art historian?" Before he could answer, she veered off the road and headed through some trees into a field, where the car bogged down to the axles, and they had to dig it out. Sophie's account includes no erotic subtext. She says that she was spending the summer at her grandmother's house, and was often sent to the station to fetch the art-world types who made small, pious pilgrimages to Duchamp's widow. On the way was a shortcut--a tractor path that was barely visible between trees. Having found out what her passenger did, Sophie liked to ask whether he or she was the adventurous version. There was almost immediately an impact as the wheels left the pavement, and then the critic or the curator would be bumping down a rutty old road that could only partly be made out. "People would arrive at the house all shaken up," Sophie says. "They had started out excited about meeting Teeny Duchamp at her house in the country--a perfect art-critic day!--and now they can't stop worrying about the ride back to the train."
In January of 2002, Sophie, who lives in New York, had a show at Naumann's gallery, Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, on East Eightieth Street. The show, her first, consisted of twenty-one deft reproductions of modern and Old Master paintings by, among others, Degas, Hopper, Vermeer, and Grant Wood, from which Sophie had removed the people or, in the still-lifes, some of the objects. Without the figures, the paintings were spooky and unsettling. One critic described them as "pronounced statements of absence." The first painting from which she removed a figure was the Mona Lisa. Sophie is married to the French Pop artist Alain Jacquet, and one night in 1997 they were looking at a book of variations made from the painting, including Duchamp's version of the Mona Lisa, with a mustache, an image that Sophie remembers from her childhood. Turning the pages, she suddenly thought, What if the Mona Lisa just got up and left? Her version of the painting has the hills in the background and the river running through the lowland, and in the foreground the balustrade that the Mona Lisa was standing in front of. Sophie called the painting "The Monna Lisa (Be Back in Five Minutes)." Naumann first saw it on display in the vault of a bank in Tribeca. Because the real "Mona Lisa" is probably the most valuable painting in the world, Sophie thought it would be funny to show it in a bank vault. To attach it to the metal wall, she glued magnets to the frame. The show at Naumann's gallery also included her version of her great-grandfather's "Goldfish," without the goldfish in the bowl on the table, and a version of Picasso's "Woman in the Mirror," without the woman. To Naumann, the noteworthy thing about the Picasso was that without the woman the painting looked like what he calls "a very austere, Nice-period Matisse";...
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