WILSHIRE CENTER

Harry Blitzstein’s loony paintings could function as a textbook illustration of the kind of dismantled Pop art currently coming out of New York’s Lower East Side. Trouble is, L.A. artist Blitzstein did these paintings 20 years ago, and in the words of Elvis Costello, it never pays to be a man out of time.

Blitzstein may have missed the bus to the fashion show, but his work has lost none of its zing; this 25-year retrospective features some of the most authentically weird work to surface hereabouts in many months. The figures in Blitzstein’s paintings all appear to be totally bonkers and look as though they’d come drooling up and ask for a dime, then recite a little Shakespeare. With the distorted appearance of faces seen through a fisheye lens, these nasty trolls are the ideal players for Blitzstein’s crazy drama.

Cuteness exaggerated to the point that it becomes savagely funny and horror so overwhelming it explodes with hysterical laughter are the order of the day here. Blitzstein blends the unbridled dementia of Ralph L. Steadman, the evil fleshiness of Hieronymous Bosch and the anarchistic intelligence of Bunuel in his sendups of art history classics and the American way.

In “Manny, Moe and Jack,” the Pep Boys come out looking like those weird Schmoo creatures that pop up in old Popeye cartoons, while a thoroughly bewildered Neanderthal ponders a paintbrush as if to say, “What the heck is this for?” in a portrait titled “The Artist.” Horrific faces peer from the murk of a hellish netherworld in a Goyaesque number called “Expulsion,” while other works feature melting hammers a la Oldenburg, or the melting faces of a Francis Bacon.

Blitzstein is a versatile draftsman who’s mastered a variety of techniques, a number of which put one in mind of graphics wiz Milton Glazer. Blitzstein has a soft, impressionistic style, a full-on abstraction mode, and a crude “child art” touch; his most successful style, however, is blatantly cartoonish. The looser and more irreverent he becomes, the more his work looks like Mad magazine, pioneer of a criminally unsung, classic American style. (170 Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., to March 22.)