Baroque Baroque

by Stephen Calloway

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.

Genres: Art, Fashion

240 pages, Paperback

First published November 17, 1994

About the author

Stephen Calloway is a curator of paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

He is an expert on 19th century art, and has made a particular study of the decadent and dandy culture of the fin de siecle.

He staged the V&A's exhibition on the 1890s, 'High Art and Low Life' in 1993, and curated the 'Aubrey Beardsley Centenary Show' in Tokyo and London in 1998.

He writes on the history of taste and lectures widely in England and America.

He also worked, in his role as a consultant on period sytle and manners, with Nicole Kidman and John Malkovich on Jane Campion's film of Henry James' novel 'The Portrait of a Lady'.

Reviews

[Servabo · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is a book about "Baroque" from the 1900s to 1990s. There is nothing Baroque during this period of time. A very misleading title indeed. Other than that the pictures were lovely.