Baroque Baroque the Culture of Excess

Now available for the first time in paperback, this extraordinary book examines the 'culture of excessÂEin all its twentieth-century manifestations. Fashion, film, photography, design and decoration: all feature in Stephen Calloway's consideration of the colourful, the opulent and the theatrical. The author examines early examples of Baroque excess ÂEby the Sitwells, Cecil Beaton, Angus McBean and others ÂEas well as the darker Baroque spirit of the wartime Neo-Romantics or film-makers such as Fellini and Jarman. Tracing the Baroque tendency into the 1990s, he shows how ideas have 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.'The most provocative and stimulating style book of the year.ÂE(New York Times) 'Baroque Baroque is a carefully written and wonderfully illustrated book ÂEit helps to define the notion of Englishness itself.ÂE(Peter Ackroyd, The Times) 'The sort of book that could itself become a landmark in taste.ÂE(Country Life)