Baroque Baroque: The Culture of Excess

(Hardback)

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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.

Reviews

"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

Author Bio

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.