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.
1900 1920s fantasy and excess; the 1930s: Neo Baroque and fantasy; the 1940s wartime Romanticism pleasing decay and the Baroque image; the 1950s romantic Baroque; the 1960s and 1970s Baroque in its nadir; the 1980s Baroque Baroque Revival.
