Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, Las Vegas Sun, March 5, 1998

A Penthouse View Lisa Ferguson Thursday, March 5, 1998 | 10:06 a.m. Bob Guccione doesn't do nudes. At least not on canvas. In the pages of Penthouse, the men's magazine he's published since 1965, sure. But you'll be hard-pressed to find much flesh in the paintings and drawings he creates for himself. "What I do for commercial reasons -- that is to say Penthouse magazine and the other magazines I publish -- I do for other people," Guccione says on the phone from his New York office. "When I paint a picture, I paint the picture exclusively for myself. If you like what I do for myself, then you appreciate my art." About 100 pieces of Guccione's work will be on display at the Las Vegas Art Museum beginning Saturday and running through April 19. Be prepared to see plenty of still life with fruit, portraits, and, of course, women -- in forests and fields and at tables -- who, for the most part, are fully clothed. "Art has many faces," Guccione says, "and the common factor in all of its aspects is aesthetics. So rain could be artistic, a cloudy sky, a brooding sea, an unusual face. Things don't have to be beautiful to be artistic, they just have to be aesthetically correct. It's all really in the eye. It is a very subjective experience." Guccione, whose company, General Media International, also publishes 15 other magazines, including Saturday Review, Omni and Longevity (available exclusively on-line), has been drawing since he was a child. As a teenager in 1945, he traveled to Europe, where he worked as a fledgling artist. While living in France, he made the rounds at tourist-frequented cafes, drawing caricatures and reading palms (in five languages, no less) for 1,000 francs each. But from a business perspective, "I was in a no-win situation," he says. "When I painted something I liked, I couldn't bear to part with it. And when I painted something I didn't like, I couldn't bear the thought of anybody else looking at it." Often, he ended up destroying his works. He eventually landed work drawing cartoons for an American publication in France, and also dabbled in advertising and greeting cards, and wrote a syndicated humor column. With his family growing (he met his late wife, former ballet dancer Kathy Keeton, in 1965) he moved to England and ran a dry cleaning company. He went on to freelance illustrations and a column for a weekly newspaper, of which he later became the editor. While perusing the newsstands, he realized that besides the American version of Playboy, there was not a regionally-produced men's magazine available in England. "I figured out very simplistically that if I borrowed the formula of Playboy and localized ... its editorial direction, that I would have a success on my hands," he says. "Pretty English girls with English editorials and articles aimed at English men rather than Americans." And Penthouse was born. Despite it's having been categorized over the years as pornographic, Guccione prefers to call its sexually explicit contents "erotica." "Pornography, to me, is a crude version of what I seek to accomplish," he says. "If something is beautiful and natural and sexual at the same time and it's done well, it's erotica. If it's done poorly, tastelessly, it's pornography. "There is nothing more beautiful in life than sex and it is difficult to depict it because it is such a subjective experience," he says. A magazine layout, "if it's done beautifully and the people are beautiful and the lighting is beautiful and the photography is beautiful and the setting is beautiful, then it is art." Even if the centerfold is Monica Lewinsky? Guccione recently offered the former White House intern $2.5 million to pose semi-nude for Penthouse. "What we really wanted was the world exclusivity of her story, if there is a story," he says. "(People) don't want to see her (naked) because she's a beautiful woman, they want to see her because they want to see what the president saw." Art versus image Over the years, as his publishing empire grew, the time Guccione spent painting dwindled. He picked up the brush again in 1992. Since then, his work has been shown at galleries around the country and in several museums, including the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, where he exhibited four years ago. Dr. Louis Zona, director of the Butler Institute, says Guccione has "a terrific compositional sense. He has a way of giving you a beautiful design, but also of capturing the likeness of the subject. He can do whatever he wants to with a paintbrush, he has that kind of a gift." But where 67-year-old Guccione goes, controversy is sure to follow. He is well aware that first-time viewers of his artwork may expect to see oil versions of Penthouse pictorials. "It is perhaps another way of attracting people to the museum or the gallery," he says of his notoriety. "I'm sure they come with the idea that they're going to see something sexual and they're going to see nudes. I'm sure they leave feeling differently." He says he hopes that exhibit-goers "can see and appreciate something they haven't seen before, and that perhaps they'll get a somewhat different impression of the man who publishes Penthouse magazine." The buzz Guccione creates was, at least in part, the motivation behind the exhibit at the Las Vegas Art Museum, according to curator James Mann, who also spent time at Guccione's home last year viewing his private art collection, which Mann estimates to be worth about $200 million. "He is an excellent artist and he's also a celebrity, so (there is a) combined package there, and it seemed to be one that would be beneficial to the museum in terms of getting a good deal of attention for non-artistic reasons," Mann says. He stresses, though, that Guccione's art "is of excellent quality. His life, character, reputation, livelihood and all that is a separate issue. We judge artists on their work, not their character. If we didn't, most of the museums in the world would be empty." Guccione says he has been influenced by all of art history, with the exception of present-day painters because, he contends, modern art has lost its "deep value. "Artists are seeking originality at the expense of art and I think that's wrong. I think art is an evolutionary process and like everything else in nature, art evolves ... because of the contribution that every other good artist makes. Artists really must learn from all the art that has gone before. "I think I've been influenced by every important artist that's ever lived," he says. "To go through life thinking, 'Aw, these guys are dead, they have nothing more to say ... I've got to find something exclusively my own,' is a terrible mistake." Bob's battles Besides painting, Guccione has also dabbled in the art of filmmaking. The screenplay for "Caligula," his infamously graphic 1980 offering, was penned by novelist Gore Vidal. The flick starred Malcolm McDowell, Peter O'Toole and Sir John Gielgud. Tired of the "crude" manner in which hard-core porn films were being made -- with poor acting, lackluster music and camera techniques, and devoid of plots -- Guccione says he set out "to do the film the way (legendary director) Cecil B. DeMille would have done it, except go all the way," rather than cut away when scenes got steamy. "I felt that in order to make a film that was truly reflective of (ancient Roman) times, it had to include what was probably the most important aspect of human activity and that certainly was sex," which was used for political and financial purposes, he says. The production was plagued with conflicts between director Tinto Brass and Guccione, who also ended up defending the film's historical accuracy in court in Boston, New York and Atlanta. Nearly two decades later, "Caligula" is still stirring debate: Last year, it was nearly yanked from the lineup at a film festival in South Africa. Such censorship is another of Guccione's pet peeves. His company is currently battling the United States defense department over the 1996 Military Honor and Decency Act, which prohibits the sale or rental of sexually explicit literature and videos on military bases. He's willing to take the case to the Supreme Court, he says. "I find any kind of repression intolerable and it makes no difference to me whether it has anything to do with sex or historic or political notions or whatever. I would fight censorship and have done so with all of my resources whether it affects me personally or not." Bitten by the filmmaking bug again two years ago, Guccione went into pre-production work on his next cinematic endeavor, a film about Catherine the Great, which he also hopes to direct. For now, though, the project has been shelved. While at the Cannes Film Festival that year promoting the production, it was discovered that Keeton, his wife, who was also General Media International's vice chairman and chief operating officer, was suffering from the later stages of breast cancer. She died late last year. Now Guccione is continuing her fight to find new treatments for the disease. He is mounting a class-action lawsuit against the National Cancer Institute, which he contends sabotaged trials of the inexpensive experimental drug hydrazine sulfate, which Keeton credited for eradicating much of her cancer. "And believe me, if it takes every penny I have, I'll bust them wide open," Guccione says. He is also active with the Kathy Keeton Cancer Research Foundation in its search for alternative treatments. He is keeping her memory alive through his work: A portrait titled "Earth Angel" was inspired by Keeton. "Now that she's passed on, everything in my life has changed." The portrait, he says, choking back tears, "is difficult for me to talk about. It's nothing that I can describe, it's just something that I felt." A different impression of the Penthouse publisher, indeed. archive