The subtitle of this book, Two Hidden Figures of the Viennese Modern Movement, is perhaps the briefest possible summary of the story Ursula Prokop has sought to tell. Jacques Groag and his wife, Jacqueline, emerged onto the architectural scene in the late 1920s and produced some remarkable modernist buildings and designs in Austria and Czechoslovakia before they were forced into exile after the Anschluss. Later, they worked in London, where Jacqueline became renowned for her exquisite textiles.
The full story, of course, is far richer. Ursula Prokop, an independent architectural and design historian in Vienna, whose previous books include a very good history of pre–World War I commercial architecture in Vienna and an insightful examination of Jewish architects in the city, has performed a meticulous excavation of the lives of these two seminal figures in the Viennese modern movement, who, if not entirely lost to history, previously were mere peripheral actors. This book, originally published in German in 2005, has altered the terrain: the Groags are now very much present in the consciousness of scholars in the field. They are hidden no more, and their rediscovery has prompted some reassessment of them and their work, but also of the history of Viennese design.
Jacques Groag was born into a Jewish family in Olmütz (now Olomouc, Czech Republic) in 1892. He studied architecture at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna, eventually passing his final state examination in 1919. He opened his own practice in 1926. Soon thereafter, he became involved with the design and building of a villa for Margaret Stonborough, the sister of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The commission for the house went first to Paul Engelmann, a young, rather inexperienced architect, and Wittgenstein himself interceded and refined the design. Both men, however, lacked expertise in building, and Groag was brought in to aid them with some of the technical details. Later, Groag worked with Adolf Loos, most notably on his design for the Villa Moller in Vienna (1927–1928), one of the best of his Raumplan houses. Finally, in the 1930s, Groag emerged as a fully independent architect, producing an array of buildings, including single-family houses, workers’ apartment buildings, and a remarkably prescient and beautiful modernist gas station.
Around the time he was first forging his reputation as a modernist architect, he met Hilde Pick, née Blumberger. Born in 1903 in Prague, she, too, came from an assimilated Jewish background. During the mid- and late 1920s, she studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna, where her teachers included Josef Hoffmann. She married young, divorced, and, after marrying Groag, changed her name in 1937 to Jacqueline Groag. In 1939, the couple fled to London. Jacques Groag had some initial success there, but in the years after World War II, he found it increasingly difficult to secure commissions. Jacqueline Groag, who had specialized in textile design (she had sold a number of her early designs to the Wiener Werkstätte), became enormously successful, emerging as one of Great Britain's most visible and successful textile designers. She continued to practice through the mid-1960s.
Prokop presents the biographical narrative well (the translation by Laura McGuire and Jonee Tiedemann is excellent), and her efforts to restore and contextualize the careers and works of the two Groags are quite successful. She is especially good at drawing connections between the Groags and the wider artistic and cultural scene in central Europe in the interwar period.
What is missing is a broader reassessment of the period itself. To be fair, this was not exactly Prokop's goal. But her repositioning of the Groags nonetheless raises many questions. Chief among them, perhaps, is how precisely their work fits into the larger Viennese Moderne. On the one hand, both Groags contributed to the Wiener Wohnkultur, the direction and idea first developed by Oskar Strnad, Oskar Wlach, Hugo Gorge, Josef Frank, and others, which called for bright, colorful, and livable interiors—a mitigated modernism, in other words, that Frank would take with him to Sweden and that would later find worldwide acceptance through the IKEA household furnishings empire.
Jacques Groag's architectural designs also display the influences of Loos, Frank, and others. They were modern, but always in a way that was different from what was being built in Germany or Switzerland. Neither of the Groags subscribed much to the idea of a living past: they did not believe that the elements of historic architecture still had a firm place and purpose in modern design. This set them apart from most of the leading older architects emerging from the ferment of Viennese progressive architecture—Hoffmann, Loos, Frank, or Jože Plečnik, to list only a few—who never shed their belief in the power of past forms. In that sense, the Groags were closer to others of their generation, those who came onto the scene after World War I, including Ernst A. Plischke, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, or Heinrich Kulka, and espoused a softened version of the new aesthetic—especially its humane qualities—but who found little room for old forms and intentions. What both Groags contributed instead was a refinement of the possibilities of a new design direction that was quintessentially novel and yet comfortable, cutting-edge and yet familiar.
