A pioneer, and a fan, of the male physique

Bob Mizer never thought of himself as an artist. But a terrific exhibition at Western Project demonstrates that the journeyman photographer, hard-working entrepreneur and wide-eyed fan of the male physique has done so much to shape the look of contemporary art and advertising that it’s hard to believe he’s not more famous -- or that a movie hasn’t been made about his life.

Like every other great artist, Mizer (1922-92) transformed his vision of a better, more beautiful world into flesh-and-blood reality by inventing an audience for something that could not be found anywhere else in the culture. He did so by building a thriving business that occupied a large part of a city block (on West 11th Street in L.A.) and employed his brother (as accountant) and mother (as a seamstress who created her own line of skimpy briefs and posing pouches, some of which she crocheted).

In 1948, Mizer was an amateur photographer smart enough to know that there was no place for him in the mainstream entertainment industry. So he started his own agency, Athletic Model Guild. AMG was meant to represent male models in the same way that Hollywood talent agencies represented stars and starlets. Mizer was then its only employee: photographer, printer, set designer, publicist, secretary and bookkeeper.

The guys he photographed, however, too often took the few bucks he paid them and disappeared on the street. Too few could be relied on to show up for the photo sessions Mizer scheduled with clients. As a traditional agency, his business was a bust.

But the black-and-white photographs Mizer printed proved to be popular and profitable. Advertising in bodybuilding and weightlifting magazines, he sold his photos to folks all over North America until the post office cracked down on magazine mail-order advertisements.

That inspired Mizer to turn the catalog he had been selling for 15 cents (the same price as Life or Look) into a magazine. In 1951, Physique Pictorial was born.

Each of Mizer’s 16-page magazines was made of four ordinary sheets of paper folded in half and stapled on the crease. He took a stack of these to the newsstand at Hollywood and Cahuenga boulevards. The rest is history.

Within a year, Physique Pictorial was on newsstands across the country and in Europe. It included little more than pictures of men as near to nude as the law allowed, simple captions and forms for ordering postcard-size prints. Imitators, including Vim, Trim and Grecian Guild Pictorial, sprung up, prospered and expired.

Mizer’s business flourished. He published his little magazine quarterly from 1951 to 1968, when the Supreme Court ruled that depictions of full frontal nudity were legal. When commercial porn was born, Mizer began to include full frontal nudity in Physique Pictorial, publishing his magazine sporadically until 1990. But its heyday was over. The off-the-cuff inventiveness and lovely sense of discovery of the first two decades were gone.

The exhibition takes viewers back to those years. It features new gelatin silver prints of negatives Mizer made from 1945 to 1969 and three huge digital prints as well as props, costumes, cameras, letters and original cut-and-paste layouts for magazine pages.

Mizer photographed more than 10,000 models, making nearly 1 million photographs. The Protestant work ethic has never looked better -- nor been applied with such workaday dedication to male erotica.

Mizer’s photographs are significant because of the broad range of ways they depict a broad range of young men. His dreamy beefcakes are homegrown, approachable and all the sexier for their unpolished imperfections. Of the 40 works displayed, many are hilarious. Some are sweet. Others are touching. A few of the guys are drop-dead gorgeous. And a few more, despite being slathered with buckets of baby oil, are still rough around the edges.

Wrestlers, cowboys and a guy gotten up like an Indian chief hang alongside leather-clad bikers, buck-naked beach bums and tanned volleyball players. A knife-wielding poseur competes for your attention with two discus throwers, whose bodies are completely covered with silver enamel, and a muscular guy trussed up like a pork roast.

Shower scenes from the 1960s represent a subgenre, which models Roger Sherwood, Dion Montello and Mac McDonald fill handsomely. The same goes for a group of campy shots from the ‘50s, with abstract patterns filling the background. Mizer made them by shining a spotlight through his mother’s crystal serving dishes. Flagrantly fake props and projected backdrops reveal that when a master is at work, fantasy needs only a nudge to get going.

A picture from the ‘50s makes the Village People look like unimaginative copycats. Mizer’s triple portrait features a jaded sailor, a centurion wearing flip-flops and a hunk done up like a pharaoh in an open sarcophagus. Another, which features John Haley’s lithe torso and graceful arms, makes him look like Leda and the Swan all rolled into one.

If Hugh Hefner’s Playboy contributed to the sexual revolution by serving up girl-next-door fantasies to American men, Mizer’s photographs delivered a similarly wholesome yet far more diverse set of fantasies to men who liked looking at men. Mizer’s influence can be seen in the work of artists as diverse as Bruce Weber and Robert Mapplethorpe, not to mention Andy Warhol and recent advertisements for Abercrombie & Fitch.

Mizer’s pictures are historically important because they capture a time, place and attitude so vividly that it still seems to be with us. His photographs are inspiring because they were not made to fill a market niche that already existed. Instead, they created the niche and then filled it with aplomb. Their legacy shows that desire is too slippery, complex and uncategorizable to be simply gay or straight.

Western Project, 3830 Main St., Culver City, (310) 838-0609, through Sept. 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Landscapes, after the apocalypse

Odd Nerdrum’s ballroom-scale paintings dream of Rembrandt, Van Eyck and Hals. But the Norwegian painter’s pictures of half-naked folks wandering around post-apocalyptic landscapes -- almost always at dusk -- live in a world of sci-fi fantasy. These generically handsome, easy-to-read images of distressed damsels, lost tribes, loyal steeds and levitating boats are the high-end version of illustrations that grace the covers of fantasy paperbacks.

At Forum Gallery, Nerdrum’s 12 shadow-shrouded canvases follow a tried-and-true formula: Slender northern Europeans, alone or in small groups, inhabit the foregrounds of misty landscapes so vast you can see the Earth’s curved horizon, behind which the sun has just set. Most wear fanciful headgear, like medieval crowns or battle helmets, and little else. Aside from a milk maiden’s frilly white frock, capes and blankets provide the only protection against the climate, which must be less inhospitable than the barren landscapes suggest. Bare feet abound.

Layer upon layer of rich golden glazes endow every square inch of each surface with the atmosphere of tasteful stateliness. Imagine an earnest version of “The Lord of the Rings” staged by an organic farming commune. That captures the curious conservatism of Nerdrum’s art, in which shameless theatricality and back-to-the-basics sentimentality fuse.

A sly sense of humor winks from some of the paintings. This suggests that Nerdrum appreciates the absurd undercurrent running through his works. But he doesn’t go as far as John Currin, who turns a similar sort of ambivalence into a campy extravaganza that is far more infatuated with being hip and trendy.

In a sense, Nerdrum’s paintings are the European equivalent of Currin’s New York pictures. Both are mannered marriages of old myths, Renaissance techniques and contemporary lowbrow sources. True to their locales, Nerdrum’s paintings are more subdued and well-mannered.

Forum Gallery, 8069 Beverly Blvd., (323) 655-1550, through Sept. 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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A sublime look at high society

Etiquette may be making a comeback among ill-mannered Americans. But it never went out of fashion in Thomas Trosch’s deliciously silly pictures of the upper crust, which, in his view, is a lot spongier than it’s made out to be. At Black Dragon Society, three big oils on canvas Trosch painted between 1993 and 1995 insist that leisure is not the birthright of the privileged few but an attitude that comes in all shapes and sizes and is available to anyone willing to risk making a fool of himself in public.

Trosch’s paintings resemble super-size “New Yorker” cartoons drawn by Miss Piggy. Across their surfaces, townhouse sophistication meets country bumpkin rambunctiousness in a blend that’s felicitous and fun-loving.

Carefully printed words, casually drawn interiors, luxuriously painted details and crudely printed patterns provide the backdrop for a cast of characters whose cliched behavior ricochets from the ridiculous to the sublime and back again. At once dopey, disarming and delightful, Trosch’s paintings transform the art world’s tempest-in-a-teacup mentality into a freewheeling tea party with pitfalls and pratfalls all its own.

Each of the New York painter’s bold works is more multilayered than a master chef’s baklava. While reading oddly poetic dialogue written in comic book style, viewers are invited into stories that seem to be the offspring of essays by Amy Vanderbilt and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

But the best parts of Trosch’s paintings are the ways they let you get lost in their abstract compositions, where paint piles up promiscuously. Some seem to cast hallucinogenic glances back to Florine Stettheimer’s sweet escapades from the 1930s and ‘40s. Others are as contemporary, unpretentious and seemingly ham-fisted as the Muppets.

Trosch paints with license, not abandon. A consummate host, he leaves the best for his guests: a generous dish of kooky civility.

Black Dragon Society, 961 Chung King Road, (213) 620-0030, through Sept. 4. Closed Sundays-Tuesdays.

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The human form in staid settings

A year and a half ago, Marti Koplin retired, her partner Eleana Del Rio took over and Koplin Gallery became Koplin Del Rio Gallery. “Drawings VII,” this summer’s installment of the biannual exhibition that began more than a decade ago, presents a focused selection of generally strong depictions of the human figure.

Landscapes, still lifes, abstractions, Surrealist-inspired phantasms and indescribable hybrids are in short supply in this group show, which zeroes in on bodies, many nude and most rendered with such attentiveness that they’re a pleasure to see, particularly because they’re far from idealized.

Among the 80 drawings by 47 artists, standouts include vividly realistic portraits by Steven Assael, Ira Korman, A.J. Smith, Robert Schultz, Bruno Surdo, James Valerio and Bill Vuksanovich. All of these meticulously realized images emphasize the physicality of living flesh by depicting it against the flat backdrop of white, gray or black.

Other artists provide settings for their figures. In general, as narrative specifics increase, realistic details decrease. This is true in engaging works by Stephen Cefalo, Warren Criswell, D.J. Hall, Zhi Lin and Kerry James Marshall. All balance precise observation against narrative suggestion, loading believable scenes with potent emotions.

A handful of artists forgo the human figure. The ones that sustain attention do so because they endow landscapes, animals and objects with the significance we usually reserve for encounters with people.

Katherine Doyle’s charcoal and pastel drawing of light streaming through trees is magical. Hilary Brace’s two postcard-size charcoals on Mylar are mysterious. Peter Zokosky’s four monkey pictures are endearing without anthropomorphizing our genetic relatives. And Rebecca Morales’ intimate still life brings a rare touch of color to an otherwise black, white and gray exhibition.

Less button-down seriousness and more unpredictability would add to a tradition that’s beginning to look a little too staid.

Koplin Del Rio Gallery, 464 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 657-9843, through Sept. 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.