"I am not surprised Fox has censored Picasso�s breasts. It is absurd and creepy to blur out the bosoms of his Women of Algiers..."

"... in a report on the painting that set a new world record this week. But it is not completely impossible to understand, because if you were a puritan or a fundamentalist or just hated women�s bodies, Picasso�s breasts are the kind of breasts you might find shocking.... Picasso�s breasts are just black circles with big dots for nipples. It is a measure of his genius that he can convey all the roundness, fullness and touchability of a breast using this graffiti-like shorthand. There are four pairs of breasts in Women of Algiers (Version O) by my count � painted in various stages of cartoonish crudity... It is a cliche to see Picasso as a misogynist whose lust for women was aggressive and patriarchal... Who hates women � Picasso who painted all those breasts, or the TV station that smeared them out?"

That's from The Guardian, scoring political points off cartoonish breasts in a painting that you'd think conservatives would want to show because it was just so darned expensive this last time it was sold and even though it knows very well that it was just some local station that was afraid someone would complain. Objections could have come from lefties as well as righties. The Guardian admits, as it must, that Picasso was a big old aggressive misogynist.

Anyway, maybe it works over in England to say "Picasso's breasts," when you only want us to think of the women's breasts that he painted, but the American mind � mine, anyway � goes straight to moobs. And Picasso is a man who often posed for pictures shirtless. I went looking for a good picture to illustrate this and I found a whole page titled "A lot of pictures of Pablo Picasso without his shirt on." I picked this one:



It's been a good year for Picasso and a good year generally for shirtless men. Mitt Romney appeared shirtless the other day (in some boxing match, but who cares?, the big deal was that he was shirtless). And images of Martin O'Malley without a shirt are continually popping up as if to say look what I can do that Hillary can't.