Rupert Murdoch censors Pablo Picasso

Tiepolo, La Verità svelata dal Tempo, uncensored version

In 2008, Silvio Berlusconi was Prime Minister of Italy. He had become a rich man by television shows full of women with hardly any clothes on. Still, Berlusconi censored a painting by the 18th-century Venetian master Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Berlusconi censored it because on that painting there was a woman (symbolizing Truth) with a naked breast. That breast was censored.

Berlusconi used to be friends with Rupert Murdoch then. Not anymore later. Like Rupert Murdoch also used to be pals with Tony Blair. But he also quarreled with Blair later.

Still, Murdoch has quite some things in common with Berlusconi. Including, as boss of Fox News, censoring women’s breasts from famous paintings.

From Newsweek in the USA:

Art critic rips ‘sexually sick conservatives’ after Fox channel blurs out breasts on Picasso painting

14 May 2015 at 15:06 ET

Lucy Westcott
Posted with permission from Newsweek

The Women of Algiers (Version “O”), a painting by Pablo Picasso, became the most expensive work to ever sell at an auction this week. Sadly, some TV viewers of a New York affiliate of Fox were treated to a blurry, G-rated version.

The painting, which sold for $179.4 million at Christie’s auction house in New York on Monday night, shows several female figures in the Cubist style, including several pairs of breasts and a couple of errant nipples. Fox 5, the Fox affiliate in New York City, obscured three pairs of breasts and covered up two nipples with a news banner at the bottom of the screen.

Pablo Picasso's Women of Algiers, in censored Rupert Murdoch version

The decision by Fox 5 to blur part of the female anatomy was blasted by Jerry Saltz, senior art critic for New York magazine, who took to Twitter on Wednesday night.

“How sexually sick are conservatives & Fox News? They blurred parts of the Picasso painting,” he tweeted, adding the hashtag #SickMinds. …

The 1955 painting, which Picasso began in 1954, was sold after 11 minutes of bidding, the BBC reports. The final price, including a 12 percent commission fee, was $179.4 million, beating the previous world record of $142.2 million set in 2013 by Francis Bacon’s painting Three Studies of Lucien Freud. The final price for The Women of Algiers (Version “O”) far surpassed the original estimate of $140 million.

Pablo Picasso's Women of Algiers, uncensored version, at the auction