By Ursula Prokop
Translated by Jonee Tiedemann and Laura McGuire
Edited by Laura McGuire
May 2019. Hardcover.
272 pages, full color edition. Catalog of works, bibliography and an index.
9780999754436 | $39.95

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 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Full color edition with images of recently found extant works, previously unpublished photo documentations, as well as paintings and diaries from family archives.

The houses of Groag with the beautiful terraces impress because of their clever balance. They radiate comfort.
– Neue Freie Presse

The oeuvre of Jacques and Jaqueline Groag in architecture, interior architecture and textile design is of superb artistic quality. Ursula Prokop establishes and illuminates its roots in the 19th/early 20th century Viennese design tradition and its de facto connections with Viennese Modernism (Adolf Loos; Austrian Werkbund), as well as post-World War II British modernism. Thoroughly researched, objectively written, her book on the Groag couple is of serious interest to any student of 20th century modernist architecture and design and should, and will, be part of every academic or museum art historical library.
        The book also documents another case of the terrible disruption of European cultural continuity, especially concerning Jewish artists and intellectuals, by Nazism and the Third Reich. The English language edition improves on the number and quality of documentary illustrations available in the German, and above all, it makes this important book accessible to a worldwide public of architects, designers, scholars and others interested in 20th century modernist architecture and design within its cultural context. I strongly acclaim the publication of this DoppelHouse Press book.
– Paul Wijdeveld, author of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Architect