Jacques and Jacqueline Groag, Architect and Designer

September 26, 2019

Jacques and Jacqueline Groag, Architect and Designer

Jacques and Jacqueline Groag, Architect and Designer: Two Hidden Figures of the Viennese Modern Movement
Ursula Prokop
DoppelHouse Press, June 2019

Ursula Prokop’s meticulous history restores Jacques and Jacqueline Groag to their rightful places in the pantheon of Viennese Modernists. Prokop explores their individual careers in Vienna and Czechoslovakia, their early collaborations in the 1930s, their lives as Jewish émigrés, and the couple’s unique contributions in Britain for postwar exhibitions, monuments, furniture and textile design.

In Vienna, the Groags studied and worked within a circle of notables including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Adolf Loos, Paul Engelmann, Josef Hoffmann, and Franz Čižek, as well as others at the Wiener Werkstätte. Jacques Groag’s solutions to Vienna’s housing crisis, his painterly use of materials and color, his ingenious interior designs for space-saving furniture in small apartments and insights into the construction of the Wittgenstein house (he was the engineer) are discussed as well as Jacqueline Groag’s rise as an influential designer in Britain, creating textiles for Heal’s, British Rail, and airlines, and—as a Royal Designer for Industry in 1984—even a dress for the future-queen Elizabeth.

Full color edition with images of recently found extant works, previously unpublished photo documentations, as well as paintings and diaries from family archives. Supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

dDAB Commentary:

According to Ursula Prokop's historical monograph on Jacques and Jacqueline Groag, the architect and designer "are largely forgotten in Austria today," even though they made significant contributions to Austrian culture between the two world wars. While I was not aware of the married couple or the name Groag, I consulted Architecture in Austria, a thorough reference in my library, to see just how forgotten they are. Jacqueline is missing in the index, but Jacques is there, pointing to just two pages: one a list of Austrian architects that emigrated to other countries, with Groag heading to Czechoslovakia and the UK; the other a list of students at Adolf Loos's private architecture college. No biography, no projects, no images; most people reading Architecture in Austria cover to cover would miss Groag entirely. So Prokop's assertion certainly pans out and makes her book necessary. First published in 2005 as Das Architekten- und Designer-Ehepaar Jacques und Jacqueline Groag, Prokop's book got translated into English fourteen years later, filling a void beyond the couple's original home country as well.

Jacques and Jacqueline Groag, Architect and Designer begins with Jacques' education and career interrupted by World War I and then moves on to his work with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Adolf Loos before focusing on Groag's independent work. His early villas and other residential commissions in the 1920s and 1930s, though not groundbreaking, are unabashedly modern, influenced clearly by Loos. In the 1930s Jacques met Hilde Blumberger (Jacqueline Groag after they emigrated to England), but we don't learn about her colorful textiles and artworks until the post-WWII chapter near the end of the book. Moving forward in time throughout the book, I couldn't help wonder if the couple would have been remembered — not "largely forgotten" — if they would have emigrated to the United States, where fellow Austrians R.M. Schindler and Richard Neutra went. I imagine the Austrian-Jewish-émigré version of Charles and Ray Eames, though that analogy goes only so far considering how rarely Jacques and Jacqueline appeared to work together (their collaboration in 1951 on the Festival of Britain was a high point). With skills in architecture, interior design, textiles, paintings, and other aspects of art and design, the Groags were capable of creating complete environments, though separately they "both achieved remarkable works in their fields," in Prokop's words.

Das Architekten- und Designer-Ehepaar Jacques und Jacqueline Groag was directed at people in Austria, while Jacques and Jacqueline Groag, Architect and Designer widens the net. A couple upcoming events might be of interest for people in the US who are intrigued by the story of the Groags: the Society of Architectural Historians, Southern California Chapter presents "No Longer Forgotten: The Groags, Transplants of Viennese Modernism" in Santa Monica, California, on September 28 and historian Christopher Long discusses the book at Book People in Austin, Texas, on October 24.

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Author Bio:

Ursula Prokop is a Viennese art and architecture historian who has written several books and regularly lectures on her research in the field of architecture and cultural history in the first half of the 20th century. She has contributed to numerous publications, collaborative studies, and research for exhibitions.

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