Baroque Baroque: The Culture of Excess

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.