The Breakdown

The Breakdown was a 1926 painting by Scottish artist John Bulloch Souter (1890–1972). It depicted a musician playing the saxophone while a naked woman dances. It was withdrawn from the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1926 after one week, and destroyed, but Souter preserved his preparatory drawings and made a second version in the 1960s.

In the painting, the woman has short shingled hair; her eyes are closed, as if she is in a trance; and her discarded clothes and shoes lie on the ground, with just one green earring visible. The musician is in full white tie evening dress with a top hat; he sits on a cast down and broken classical statue of Minerva, the goddess of music. The musician is black and the woman is white, playing on contemporaneous concerns about the popularity of (largely black) jazz music to the (largely white) British public, and the perceived threat posed by black men to white women.

Souter's stated intention was to "illustrate the tendency nowadays for Jazz influence to permeate our daily lives", and to "suggest the fascination exercised by the primitive and savage upon the over-civilised". The title as a reference to a slave dance called the "break down", and to the breakdown of traditions.

The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1926, which opened on 3 May, the day before the start of the 1926 General Strike. The painting was viewed by King George V and praised by the President of the Royal Academy, Frank Dicksee, as "a work of great promise by executed with a considerable degree of excellence". However, it quickly became controversial. It was condemned in newspapers and periodicals from the UK — an early edition of the Melody Maker reported that "'Breakdown' is … a picture entirely nude of the respect due to the chastity and morality of the younger generation … the best thing that could happen to it is to have it … burnt!" — to the US — the Boston Evening Transcript criticised it under the headline "A Racial Outrage" — and South Africa, where the Cape Argus called it a "problem picture … Negro Supersedes Minerva". It was removed after only five days at the request of the Colonial Office and replaced by a portrait of Lady Diana Manners by James Jebusa Shannon.

Evelyn Waugh attended the exhibition in its first week. The controversy over the painting may have inspired him to include a mixed-race relationship between the white Margot and black Chokey in his 1928 novel Decline and Fall.

Souter destroyed the painting, but kept his preparatory drawings. For decades it was only known from a photograph published in the exhibition catalogue, but Souter made a second version in the 1960s. A charcoal study was acquired by the Aberdeen Art Gallery in 2016, with funding from the Scottish National Fund for Acquisitions.

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