MISSING WOMEN : Try to Find the Original Females in Kathy Grove’s Reproductions of Famous Paintings and Photos

The metal washtub is in its accustomed place on the sunny, yellow-and-turquoise floor. On the ledge above it, the pitcher, the teapot, the brush, the scissors, the crumpled piece of unidentifiable clothing--everything is in readiness. Only the lithe, crouching nude woman with red hair is missing from Kathy Grove’s altered photograph of Edgar Degas’ 1886 painting, “The Tub.” And that’s precisely the point.

Each one of Grove’s reproductions of famous paintings and photographs--”The Other Series,” at the University Art Museum, Cal State Long Beach through Dec. 13--is as plausible as any photograph in an art history book, except that all the women are missing.

Working directly on photographic reproductions of the originals, Grove deftly removes the Madonnas, mothers, mistresses, studio models, and Biblical and mythological figures, and fabricates seamless backgrounds--faithful to each artist’s style--in their place.

In Grove’s revision of Edouard Manet’s “Dejeuner sur l’herbe,” only a patch of grass exists in the spot where a nude woman staring boldly at the viewer once sat, keeping scandalous company with two fully clothed men and a picnic lunch.

Adam gets booted out of Paradise all by himself in Masaccio’s “The Expulsion From Paradise.” Velasquez’s “Rokeby Venus” has fled her luxurious bed, leaving only a young male angel holding a hand mirror reflecting empty space. No lithe blond figure balances on the seashell in Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus.” In Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss,” a newly tense-looking male figure embraces nothing but a vivid abstract pattern.

In her statement (printed in the accompanying brochure), Grove explains that by emphasizing the absence of the women in the paintings, she is “portraying women as they have been regarded throughout history, invisible and inaudible.”

In the history of Western painting, women do take center stage, but primarily as objects of piety or temptation for the (assumed) male viewer. By using her artistic sleight-of-hand to whisk these female figures out of their compositions without leaving a trace, Grove mimics the sins of omission in standard versions of history, where women’s achievements frequently go unrecorded.

Yet, no matter how smoothly filled in with furniture, scenery or bright patterns, the empty spaces in the photographs remain mysteriously “full” of the missing figures. By creating such conspicuous vacuums in such famous paintings, Grove imbues the female figures with a playful new power. It’s as if the Madonnas and whores amiably agreed to leap off their canvases and disappear together for a few hours, laughing conspiratorially at the dither they’d created for collectors and museums and viewers.

One of Grove’s works departs from this pattern, however. In her version of Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother, Nipomo”--a famous 1936 photograph of a careworn mother and her children--the woman remains in the picture. But Grove gives her a make-over (and a bath, too, it seems) so that--without departing from her famous pose--she now resembles a pretty actress playing the role of a Depression mom.

Lange had already transformed her sitter into an object of sympathy by selecting a pensive pose, framing her between the tousled heads of her children, and cropping the picture to focus viewers’ attention. By taking the transformation one step further--retouching the woman’s wrinkles and dirt--Grove suggests that a contemporary audience would be even more likely to “buy” this image if it came in the sugarcoated version of a Hollywood movie.

While pursuing her feminist agenda, Grove also undermines blase habits of looking without seeing. Obliged to scrutinize images they might normally scoot by with little more than a brief acknowledgment (“Oh, yeah, that famous Botticelli ‘Venus’ ”), viewers are liable to find more than they remembered, or expected to find.

Incidentally, for viewers who can’t quite remember--or don’t know--what the originals of Grove’s photographs look like, the gallery wisely has provided a table spread with illustrated art history books for consultation. Of course, the reproductions in these books are no more than flat, mechanical copies of the originals, as innocently misleading in their own way as Grove’s out-and-out fakes. But in our media-driven world, reproductions have assumed the magical power of originals--a phenomenon that gives Grove’s work its uncanny veracity and powerful attraction.