Baroque Baroque: The Culture of Excess

Description

This book examines the culture of excess in all its 20th-century manifestations. Fashion, film, photography, design and decoration: all feature in Stephen Calloway's sweep through the colourful, the opulent and the theatrical. The author examines the early forays into the visual possibilities of Baroque excess - by the Sitwells, Cecil Beaton, Angus McBean and others - as well as the emotionally darker investigation of the Baroque spirit by the wartime Neo-Romantics or film-makers such as Fellini and Jarman. Tracing the Baroque tendency into the 1990s, he demonstrates how ideas have cross-fertilized down the century, providing links between such unlikely bedfellows as Leon Bakst and Luis Bunuel, Coco Chanel and Nigel Coates, Liberace and Lacroix. Illustrated with a wealth of photographs taken from all areas of the arts and the media, this book provides a celebration that is truly Baroque in its richness and variety.

Stephen Calloway is Associate Curator of Paintings at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. He is also a writer, lecturer, designer and consultant on historical interiors, and a frequent contributor to television and radio programmes. His books include Twentieth Century Decoration, The House of Liberty, The Elements of Style, Oscar Wilde, An Exquisite Life and Aubrey Beardsley.

"The most provocative and stimulating style book of the year."-The New York Times "Baroque Baroque is a carefully written and wonderfully illustrated book... It helps to define the notion of Englishness itself."-The Times "The sort of book that could itself become a landmark in taste."-Country Life