Jacques and Jacqueline Groag, Architect and Designer
Two Hidden Figures of the Viennese Modern Movement
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 emigres, 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.
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.”
