No Longer Forgotten:
Architect and Designer Couple Jacques and Jacqueline Groag,
Transplants of Viennese Modernism

Santa Monica Public Library,
Saturday, September 28 at 2pm

Join publisher Carrie Paterson and Dr. Laura McGuire, translator and Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Hawaii, for a slide lecture and conversation about two pillars of Modernism who were nearly lost to history.

Jacques and Jacqueline Groag were notable in their fields before the Nazi Anschluss of Austria. The Groag couple transplanted themselves first to their native Czechoslovakia but then fled to Britain when the Nazis invaded Prague in 1939. Bringing their unique aesthetics to Britain, they were critical participants in the Modern revolution in that country post-war. With many of their works buried in time, no longer extant, or split between five different countries, it took Viennese design scholar Ursula Prokop ten years to trace the important roles they played in the Second “Wiener Moderne” working with design icons such as Adolf Loos, Josef Hoffmann, Paul Engelmann, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and in Britain with Sir Gordon Russell, as well as textile and furniture companies. McGuire translated Prokop’s book about the Groags into English, and Paterson helped complete the picture through image and design research in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Britain, as well as through living relatives in the United States and Israel, residents of former Jacques Groag houses, and through Jacqueline Groag textile collectors in Denver, Colorado.

McGuire specializes in early- and mid-century architecture and design history and was a Fulbright Scholar in 2009 and a Richard Plaschka grantee from 2011–13 in Austria. She has spent the last decade working on essays, exhibitions, and editorial projects that reflect on Vienna’s unique cultural contributions through immigrant and exiled cultural figures.

Paterson is a Los Angeles-based author, editor, and publisher at DoppelHouse Press, which released Prokop’s Groag biography in English in June 2019.

Presented by the Society of Architectural Historians,
Southern California Chapter