Now available for the first time in paperback, this extraordinary book examines the 'culture of excess' in all its twentieth-century manifestations. Fashion, film, photography, design and interior decoration - all feature in Stephen Calloway's meticulous coverage of the colourful, the opulent and the theatrical.
The author examines early examples of Baroque excess - by the Sitwells, Cecil Beaton, Angus McBean and others - as well as the darker Baroque spirit of the wartime Neo-Romantics and film-makers such as Fellini and Jarman. Tracing the Baroque tendency all the way into the 1990s, he shows how ideas have been cross-fertilized, providing links between such unlikely bedfellows as Leon Bakst and Luis Buñuel, Coco Chanel and Nigel Coates, Liberace and Lacroix.
Illustrated with a wealth of photographs, this book provides a celebration that is truly Baroque in substance and in spirit.
- ISBN10 0714838608
- ISBN13 9780714838601
- Publish Date 3 February 2000 (first published 17 November 1994)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 25 May 2021
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Phaidon Press Ltd
- Edition New edition
- Format Paperback
- Pages 240
- Language English