We identify Henri Matisse with color, but he was also a prolific printmaker who produced more than 800 woodcuts, dry points, etchings, aquatints, linocuts, and monotypes. He used prints as an alternative to drawing, and preferred traditional monochrome to the high coloration of prints and posters current in the early modern period.

Over a lifetime, Matisse designed and illustrated 12 livres d’ artiste, works of art published unbound in portfolio format in limited editions. Two are on exhibit at the Katonah Museum, both of which were commissioned by the Swiss publisher Albert Skira. The first comprises Matisse’s etchings for “Poesies,” selected poems by the 19th-century French Symbolist Stephane Mallarme. The second is the fruit of a seven-year collaboration with Skira that produced 126 sanguine lithographs for “Florilege des Amours de Ronsard,” celebrating the love lyrics of the 16th-century French poet Pierre Ronsard. Matisse exercised full control over selection and interpretation of verses, page layout, paper quality, and typeface.

Of the 29 limpid etchings created for “Poesies,” 16 are on display. It is a joy to see these beguilingly simple images, some of them among Matisse’s greatest works in the medium. Their beauty derives not only from grace of line but from the fluorescence of suggested volumes perfectly positioned on the white page. They would be wonderful enough as drawings, but these lilting lines were incised on metal plates, a process that demands great certainty and level pressure. They are nothing less than magical.

The irrevocability of these works has much in common with Chinese brush painting. Both kinds of mastery are the fruit of intense and categoric concentration. Each line is an ordered choice that describes its subject while simultaneously creating a satisfying independent shape. (“Le Cygne” captures the bird that attacked Matisse’s rowboat the day his son Pierre took that famous photo of him sketching swans in the Bois de Boulogne.)

With the Mallarme etchings firmly in mind, you are better equipped to make judgments about the Ronsard lithographs, even drawing itself. The etchings date from 1930-32; the lithographs were produced between 1941 and 1948. By then, Matisse was severely debilitated, battling cancer and wheelchair-bound. His suffering tells in a lessening of volumetric suggestion combined, off and on, with lapses in drawing. We are encouraged to interpret the regressions of great artists as revelations of something higher. But unless we see these through unsentimental eyes, we cannot grasp the felicity – and urgency – of Matisse’s turn to cutouts, which, by necessity, complete and clarify forms that his later drawing sometimes failed to do.

Matisse’s spatial intuition was unerring; each of these illustrations commands the picture space in perfect communion with the printed text. But several tolerate disconcerting gaps between conception and execution of the subject. The five figures of “La Danse,” a key theme in Matisse’s work, look like a ring of squid. In “Bather in a Stream,” which echoes Matisse’s magnificent “Bathers by a River” (1906-16), graceful foliate forms overhang an awkward female figure. The broken lines of her arm and the crayon’s confused search for a place to put the head distract from the Edenic intent of the composition. More intricate compositions such as “Nymph and Goat” lack linear coherence; their expressiveness depends heavily on their titles. “Design in the Form of a Bird in Flight,” intended as an outline of two birds as one, seemed nothing more than the contour of an inkblot until I looked at the wall plaque.

The loveliest and surest of these 47 Ronsard prints are those that keep close to motifs Matisse knew by heart and for which he had an abiding fondness: botanical shapes, condensed female portraits, and favored studio objects – like the fluted vase or the tobacco jar – that migrated from painting to painting over the years. With exquisite economy, “Plant Form” insinuates both a woman holding a bouquet overhead and a tree trunk surrounded by flowers. His double-paged “Epitaph for Marie,” a harmony of typography and a sensuous, blanketing leaf pattern, is one of the most successful improvisations in the book. And a flower arrangement in the old Tabac Royal jar, renamed “Jaime Marie,” is pure song.

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What do you do when art is the family business and you are the great-granddaughter of Henri Matisse and the step-granddaughter of Marcel Duchamp? You take refuge in conceptual art, a shelter for artists in search of a subject.

Six paintings by Sophie Matisse, a New York artist, are on view simultaneously in a small side gallery at Katonah. She annexes masterworks by Thomas Eakins, Henri Matisse, Charles Wilson Peale, Velazquez, and Vermeer, repainting them minus their living subjects. It is good fun to see the fish missing from her grandfather’s famous “The Goldfish” (1912) or the figures of her great-grandparents erased from “The Conversation” (1908-10). But patricides devoutly wished are more compelling to psychoanalysts than lovers of painting.

An accompanying video and brochure strive to complicate what Ms. Matisse admits are jokes. But the best joke here is not Ms. Matisse’s; it is Peale’s. He set his trompe l’oeil “Staircase Group (Portrait of Raphaelle Peale and Titian Ramsey Peale)” into a real doorframe and placed a wooden step in front. That was in 1795. Ms. Matisse’s “The Staircase Group” (2001) omits the two boys but adds nothing new to Peale’s crypto-modern wit.

A wall plaque insists that without living figures, the meaning of the pictures “is up for grabs.” No, it is not. Ms. Matisse’s appropriations do not affect the originals or the way we experience them. And these have no meaning of their own. Grandpa Duchamp’s demolitions lost their charge a long time ago.

“Henri Matisse: A Celebration of French Poets and Poetry” and “Once Removed: Paintings by Sophie Matisse” until September 18 (Katonah Museum of Art, Route 22 at Jay Street, Katonah, N.Y., 914-232-9555).