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

Review

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

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.

Edition details

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