The Breakdown

The Breakdown

The Breakdown was a 1926 painting by Scottish artist John Bulloch Souter (1890–1972) which stirred controversy in the United Kingdom during the Jazz Age. The work depicted a black jazz musician playing the saxophone while a naked white woman dances, as if in a trance.Amid outrage in the British press, the painting was withdrawn from the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1926 after one week at the request of the British Colonial Office as the subject matter "was considered to be obnoxious to British subjects living abroad in daily contact with a coloured population".The painting was then destroyed by its author and his wife, but Souter preserved his preparatory drawings and made a reconstructed version in 1962, one decade before his death. The painting has been described as embodying the fears of Western civilization towards jazz music.

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