Jacques and Jacqueline Groag, Architect and Designer: Two Hidden Figures of the Viennese Modern Movement - Hardcover

Prokop, Ursula

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0999754432 ISBN 13: 9780999754436

Publisher: DoppelHouse Press, 2019

Synopsis

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, even a dress for future-queen Elizabeth II. Full color edition, supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

About this title

About the Author:

Laura McGuire is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Hawaii’s School of Architecture in Manoa. She specializes in early- and mid-century architecture and design history with a combined Ph.D. in those fields from University of Texas, Austin. A Fulbright Scholar in Austria in 2009, she has spent the last decade working on exhibitions, articles, book chapters, and other editorial projects that reflect on Vienna’s unique cultural contributions through immigrant and exiled cultural figures, including designer Paul T. Frankl, architect/artist Frederick Kiesler, and philosopher Otto Neurath.

Jonee Tiedemann is a certified translator and interpreter from Germany who lives in Argentina, has studied in the United States, and works between the three languages: German, Spanish and English. He specializes in architecture and design books, as well as self-published German indie literature.

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. In addition to writing the definitive biography and analysis of Jacques and Jacqueline Groag and their work, Das Architekten- und Designer-Ehepaar Jacques and Jacqueline Groag: Zwei vergessene Künstler der Wiener Moderne (Böhlau 2005), she is the author of a biography of Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein (Böhlau 2003), acclaimed by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Kunstmarkt as a biography that “makes the past come to life in an exciting way.” The Neue Zürcher Zeitung called the Stonborough-Wittgenstein book one “of high merit” and “insightful into the lives of the Wittgenstein family,” while the review from the Süddeutsche Zeitung found the book exemplary for providing “new contours” not just to the Wittgenstein family story and Margaret, one of the more famous sitters for Gustav Klimt, but to the picture of early-20th-century bourgeoisie life. Prokop’s earlier biography of controversial architect Rudolf Perco (Rudolf Perco 1884–1942: From the Architecture of Red Vienna to Nazi Megalomania ; Böhlau 2001) was the first comprehensive biography of this model student of Otto Wagner and Prix-de-Rome winner of 1910. It explored his adventuresome unbuilt designs, his descent into a utopian fantasy of state control, his disenchantment with the Nazis and subsequent disenfranchisement, leading to his suicide in 1942. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung found the book to have “a wealth of facts” and to be “meticulously researched.”

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

The architect and designer couple Jacques and Jacqueline Groag were two artists among the many who worked in Vienna during the interwar period. Despite their significant contributions to the artistic and cultural life of those years, they are largely forgotten in Austria today. As part of the group that formed around Adolf Loos, Josef Hoffmann, and Josef Frank, the Groags were members of a small avant-garde that prevented post World War I Vienna from slipping into provinciality after World War I. In Austria’s increasingly cloistered postwar cultural climate, it was this group in particular who kept contact with international modernity alive. This period, however, ended with the displacement of mostly Jewish artists and intellectuals in 1938 by National Socialism – a fate shared by the Groags. The tragic life of Jacques Groag and his wife Hilde Blumberger, who would only later call herself Jacqueline Groag, as well as the disenfranchisement and annihilation of the Austrian Jews signified the partial obliteration of Austrian cultural identity – and is thus a significant story in Austrian history.

Jacques Groag and his wife were not born in Vienna, but came from countries belonging to the double monarchy. Yet it is appropriate to call them “Viennese” artists because they received their education in the capital city, and that city was the focal point of their lives and artistic work until 1938. The Groags’ ouevre is fundamentally embedded in the artistic environment of the Austrian interwar period. The couple’s identity is nevertheless complex and eschews strict national attributions due to their complex biographic circumstances: Jacques Groag was active not only in Vienna, but also realized numerous building projects in the former Czechoslovakia; Jacqueline Groag (Hilde Blumberger) worked briefly in France and the United States before leaving Austria. After emigrating to Great Britain, the couple found a second home and a new artistic milieu.

The Groag’s story particularly highlights the destructive incursion of National Socialism into the cultural life of Central Europe, which is still felt today. While Jacques Groag’s buildings and interiors enjoyed numerous comprehensive publications during his lifetime, his work was soon entirely forgotten in Austria. In regard to his work as a furniture designer, the situation was even worse. The majority of his furniture pieces were lost, and the few remaining pieces were spread all over the world as their owners also emigrated – from Haifa and Jerusalem to London, Vienna and Olmütz (Olomouc). In 1978, Vladimir Šlapeta was the first scholar to bring attention to the “Olmütz Students of Adolf Loos” and to Jacques Groag; his important essay, however, was limited mostly to Groag’s projects in Olmütz.

In a 1995 exhibition catalog about architects who immigrated to London, a short article published by Charlotte Benton dealt with the subject in a similar way, almost exclusively considering Jacques Groag's furniture design in England. His architectural work from before the war was hardly discussed. Consideration of Groag only entered the discourse of architectural history due to an uptick of interest in Ludwig Wittgenstein and widespread interest in his so-called “Wittgenstein house” from the late 1920s in Vienna. In his monograph about the building, Paul Wijdeveld was the first to point out that the Jacques Groag, a trained civil engineer, was not only the chief contractor, but had played a further role in the design. Yet until now, there has been no comprehensive reassessment of Groag’s work and activity, which is in part due to the pre-war division of his oeuvre between Vienna and Czechoslovakia, and after the war, the fact that he worked exclusively in England. [...] The present work had been produced thanks to research project no. 7726, sponsored by the National Bank´s Jubiläumsfond (Jubilee Fund), conducted by the Institut für Kunstgeschichte (Institute for Art History) of the Vienna University under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Peter Haiko, to whom I also extend my thanks.

A minor difficulty is presented by the spelling of the Czech locations whose former German name is now not typically used. However, for the sake of simplicity and following the spelling convention of the then German-language publications, the German spellings are utilized and the Czech names are mentioned only once when they first appear. I ask my Czech colleagues for their understanding.

Ursula Prokop, 2005

Nearly fifteen years have passed since this book was first published in Vienna. It has helped that Groag has gained a certain degree of fame, at least in the professional world. I have lectured several times at various symposiums on Groag. In 2009, a very beautiful biography of Jacqueline Groag was published in England, which was able to build on my work and highlight its significance for English postwar design. In 2012, on the occasion of the eighty-year anniversary of the Vienna Werkbundsiedlung, the Wien Museum held the exhibition Werkbundsiedlung Wien, 1932: A Manifesto of New Living. At the opening I had the honor to meet the descendants of Stefan and Eva Schanzer, who owned House No. 45 in the Werkbundsiedlung, which was built by Jacques Groag. The Schanzer family was exiled from Austria in 1938, and today the descendants live in the United States. Ms. Carrie Paterson, the publisher of DoppelHouse Press, is a granddaughter of Stefan Schanzer, thus closing the circle to Jacques Groag. It is a pleasure for me that she is bringing out this book in the English edition.

Vienna, 2018
1 Vladimir Šlapeta, “Paul Engelmann und Jacques Groag, die Olmützer Schüler von Adolf Loos” (Paul Engelmann and Jacques Groag, The Olmütz Students of Adolf Loos) in: Bauwelt (Building World) 1978, no. 40, p. 1494 et seq., henceforth quoted as Šlapeta 1978.

2 Charlotte Benton, “Jacques Groag 1892–1962,” in: A Different World, Émigré Architects in Britain 1928–1958 (cat.), London 1995, p. 160.

3 Paul Widjeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Architekt (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Architect), Amsterdam 1994, henceforth quoted as Wijdeveld.

4 Geoffrey Rayner / Richard Chamberlain / Annamarie Stapleton, Jacqueline Groag, Textile and Pattern Design: Wiener Werkstätte to American Modern, Woodbridge / Suffolk: Antique Collectors' Club, 2009.

About this edition

• Publisher: DoppelHouse Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0999754432
• ISBN 13: 9780999754436
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272