Explore the Description and themes of this artwork, The Breakdown.
In Souter's painting, a negro jazz musician is in full white tie evening dress with a top hat; he sits on a cast down and shattered classical statue of Minerva, the goddess of virginity and traditional values. Nearby, an androgynous female dancer –  a flapper with short bobbed hair –  has her eyes are closed, as if she is in a trance. Her hastily discarded lingerie and green leather shoes are scattered on the ground, with just one green earring visible. A flesh-colored stocking lies draped over the statue's broken arm.The musician's race and instrument signifies that he is playing jazz music. He is black and the woman is white, playing on contemporaneous concerns about the popularity of (predominantly black) jazz music to the (predominantly white) British public, and the perceived threat posed by hypersexualised and exoticised black men to white women, in the wake of thousands of brown babies born to British women following World War I. However, according to critic Karl Toepfer, "the musician gazes not at the woman but out toward the spectator, and the implication is that jazz and dance together allow man and woman to cross racial barriers and form a new and mysteriously intimate (or trusting) sort of couple, each immersed in separate aspirations."Souter's stated intention was to "illustrate the tendency nowadays for Jazz's influence to permeate our daily lives", and to "suggest the fascination exercised by the primitive and savage upon the over-civilised". The title of his painting was a twin reference to both "a musical breakdown," in which a jazz musician has the freedom to express their own improvised statement, and "a societal breakdown" in which women in British society could express a similar freedom now that gender roles had been redefined.
bobbed World War I Minerva Jazz jazz music top hat jazz flapper brown babies trance white tie androgynous