# Racist undertones of Britain’s jazz age explored in exhibition: Video

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2018/02/10/racist-undertones-of-britains-jazz-age-explored-in-exhibition-video/
- Published: 2018-02-10T10:47:03+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**Maev Kennedy attends an exhibition about the fascination with jazz in 1920s England
and specifically focuses on the racist undertones found in some of the exhibits.
She talks to the show’s curator Catherine Tackley and tells the story of the painting“
The Breakdown” by Scottish painter John Bulloch Souter which shows a black musician
sitting on a shattered statue of Minerva, playing to a dancing naked white woman,
and which was taken down after five days at the Academy’s summer exhibition in 1926
because of complaints that it was “considered to be obnoxious to British subjects
living abroad in daily contact with a coloured population”. **

London show includes a version of The Breakdown, a painting that caused outrage 
in 1926. Versions of a painting that caused such outrage in 1926 that it was taken
off the walls of the Royal Academy on the orders of the Colonial Office will go 
on public display in an exhibition tracing the glamour but also the racist undertones
of the jazz age in Britain.

The exhibition, Rhythm & Reaction, opening on Saturday at Two Temple Place in London,
has loans from museums and private collections showing how the exciting new music
spread for the first time by radio and recordings.

The displays include a drum with a painting of a chicken that laid giant eggs as
the highlight of the act, textiles and tea sets that brought the jazz age into suburban
homes, posters of glamorous dancers in jazz clubs, record collectors’ club magazines
and a glorious pair of golden dance slippers with diamond heels.

However, the exhibition also looks at the reaction to music seen by some as “primitive”
or even “savage”, including the saga of The Breakdown, by the Scottish artist John
Bulloch Souter, taken down after five days at the Academy’s summer exhibition.

It showed a black musician sitting on a shattered statue of Minerva, playing to 
a dancing naked white woman. According to the Royal Academy’s annual report, the
letter from the Colonial Office said the subject “was considered to be obnoxious
to British subjects living abroad in daily contact with a coloured population”.

The exhibition’s curator, Catherine Tackley, professor of music at the University
of Liverpool, said: “In many ways the reaction to the painting epitomises the response
to this new jazz music. Huge popular enthusiasm – and an undercurrent of suspicion
that this was a dangerous new art form subverting decent society.”

News of the painting went around the world: one US paper, the Boston Evening Transcript,
under the heading A Racial Outrage, commented: “It lays itself out to horrify decent
people and yet has somehow contrived to come inside the limitations laid down by
the hanging committee.” In South Africa, the Cape Argus headed its account “Problem
Pictures of 1926 – Negro Supersedes Minerva”.

When Tackley wrote a book published in 2005 on the origins of jazz in Britain, she
used a black and white illustration of the painting from the Royal Academy catalogue,
which she believed to be its only surviving image.

Souter, who later worked on portraits and commissioned copies of Old Master paintings,
said in one interview: “It wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow in Aberdeen.” He insisted
he had completely destroyed the painting, but in fact he had kept his original drawings.
Ten years before his death in 1972, evidently still haunted by the episode, he painted
a new version. All the versions, now in private collections, are included in the
exhibition.

The first introduction to jazz for many in Britain was a tour in 1919 by the Original
Dixieland jazz Band, but Tackley traces its roots in the country much further back,
through ragtime music during the first world war and the hugely popular minstrel
shows and banjo bands of the Edwardian era.

The exhibition is sponsored by the Arts Society, which celebrates its 50th anniversary
this year. Its director Florian Schweizer, himself an enthusiast recently excited
to learn that Django Reinhardt once played in a tiny jazz club yards from his London
home, said: “This was the first musical art form that everyone could hear, captured
in contemporary recordings. We at the Arts Society like art cropping up in unexpected
places.”

_Rhythm and Reaction, the Age of Jazz in Britain, Two Temple Place, free, daily 
except Tuesdays until 22 April 2018_

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