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.
