Jane Stevenson's Baroque between the Wars synthesizes many narrower historical studies in order to mount a broad challenge to conventional accounts of interwar British modernism. Stevenson proposes that the long-standing “binary relationship between classical and baroque art” that Heinrich Wölfflin theorized in the nineteenth century continued into the twentieth and “affected all the arts” (2). This history was lost, Stevenson argues, later in the twentieth century, when the rise of institutional patronage enforced a modernism intolerant of alternatives. “Fundamentally, modernism assumes that there is only one legitimate point of view, that of an educated male élite, and only one moment, now. Hence it has difficulty in coping with multiple points of view, with popular culture, and with both the past and future” (12). Institutional authorities suppressed the variety of British modernism—and the memory of that variety. Baroque between the Wars recaptures the modern incarnation of the baroque in seventeen chapters arranged in four sections: “Society,” “The City,” “Rooms,” and the “Uncanonical Arts”—although this last rubric describes Stevenson's archive as a whole.

The book begins with structures of patronage before the hegemony of tax-supported initiatives like the Arts Council. In a passage that exemplifies Stevenson's engaging prose style, she describes the interwar years as the last when “rich people had to buy paintings, voyage on transatlantic liners, and visit the theatre, while poor people had to buy tea sets and go to the cinema, for the arts to be viable” (3). Her discussion of patrons and artists explores both the potential for and limitations on social mobility among the Bright Young People. Here it becomes clear that Baroque between the Wars makes a substantial contribution to queer history, understood as a category that integrates same-sex erotic attraction with challenges to norms of masculinity and femininity. Stevenson offers short, evocative sketches of famous figures, such as Noël Coward, but usefully pays particular attention to “the contribution of gay women to the interwar arts” (41) before concluding the first section with a chapter devoted to the remarkable Sitwell siblings.

Stevenson's argument for reading the interwar period's alternative-modern aesthetic as baroque is especially persuasive in the chapter on the Sitwells, which discusses Sacheverell Sitwell's popular books on the baroque and the eclectic decoration of the well-known house he shared with his brother, Osbert. In the second section, the idea of the baroque connects phenomena ranging from Camille Sitte's advocacy for complex urban settings that emerged over time to the films of Charlie Chaplin, whose “art descends directly from the commedia dell'arte” (97), and the surrealist-inflected “Curzon-Street Baroque” architecture (Alan Powers's term) of houses commissioned by “wealthy and aesthetic bachelors” (145). The book's third section illuminates baroque aspects of interwar gardens and interior surfaces from textiles to murals. Subsequent chapters take up ballet, flowers, perfumes, makeup, and dress, the latter with an emphasis on women who bucked fashion trends and fancy-dress parties where standards of sartorial success tilted “away from the merely rich towards the clever and inventive” (258). The Sitwells return in an epilogue that opens with the collaborative performances of recitation, music, and dance, inspired by Edith Sitwell's cycle of poems titled Façade. Following Eugenio d'Ors's observation that “a leading characteristic of the baroque arts is that they take on aspects of one another,” Stevenson argues that “the various works called Façade form, between them, a quintessence of modern baroque aesthetic achievement” (295).

Stevenson's method is anecdotal and additive, with a remarkable range of examples. Baroque between the Wars teems with detail and carries readers along on its author's enthusiasm for the personalities and culture of the interwar era. Our journey through the period is punctuated with provocative perceptions, among them a contrast between “the prevailing modernist trope of despair at the state of things” and the idea that the baroque “fundamentally tends towards optimism” in its “dialogue with a popular culture” (5). The queerness of the modern baroque is tied to its optimism, becoming a defiant mode of fantasy to counter authoritative injunctions to “despair” (16). Readers wanting a carefully developed argument about the baroque may be disappointed, however. A chapter titled “Masks” fails even to invoke the term baroque. And Stevenson leaves unresolved the relationship between the optimism she sees in the baroque and what she identifies as its insistent, nostalgic (if campily so) engagement with the past, culminating with the “genuine anguish” of Rex Whistler's last mural, left unfinished when he died in World War II (302).

Baroque between the Wars is primarily a study of visual culture. Somewhat undercutting her thesis, Stevenson's chapter on literature registers the baroque tendencies of canonic modernist writers, such as James Joyce with his “complex and playful relation with the language and literature of the past,” but argues that their writing “did not, and could not, affect the development of popular fiction” the way “ballet could cross-fertilize with jazz dance or clowning” (112–13). But the same audiences welcomed jazz, ballet, and Joyce, and Stevenson acknowledges that T. S. Eliot's poetry, influenced by “jazz, vaudeville, and music hall” (113), was “financially as well as critically successful” (115). An explanation for the rigid policing of modernist canons in the visual arts will have to await future studies.

Issues of race also await other authors. Despite Stevenson's purpose to critique ideologies identified with experts who were “male, straight, upper-class, white,” and so on (5), the interwar penchant for blackamoor statuary is described rather than analyzed. A short chapter titled “Whiteness,” on all-white interiors and stage sets, makes no explicit reference to race, and its characterization of the “desperately unflattering” effect of all-white costumes that require “apricot-tinted make-up to keep the actors from looking like corpses” reinforces conventional racial assumptions (201).

Of course, no book can do everything. Baroque between the Wars interweaves a large cast of characters and a varied visual archive to upend a great many taken-for-granteds about the era. Stevenson's sustained attention to queer “alterity” in this account of a baroque counter-modernism offers welcome insight on the diversity of interwar culture.