Addressing the maniacal, eccentric, and disorienting in artworks made between 1950 and 1980, Delirious situates a fascination with the absurd and irrational within the context of the violence and brutality witnessed during World War II as well as the rapid expansion of industrial capitalism in the 1950s. Skepticism of science and technology--along with fear of its capability to promote mass destruction--developed into a distrust of rationalism, which in the arts had the paradoxical result of extracting irrational effects from rational means.