Jacques and Jacqueline Groag: Architect and Designer — Two Hidden Figures of the Viennese Modern Movement by Ursula ProkopLaura McGuire Jonee TiedemannLaura McGuire

Abstract

Reviews 203 these diaries, the writing here often turns purple: Alma’s tears ‘well up’, she is ‘plunged’ into despair, while as disasters ‘loom’ storms ‘brew’ outside (pp. 42, 43). Hilmes’s work is only perfunctorily acknowledged, but Passionate Spirit reveals a certain indebtedness to Malevolent Muse, especially in the closing chapters where there is an observable material overlap between the two. For instance, both contain sections entitled ‘La grande veuve’. At all stages, however, Hilmes’s text is richer and more deeply rooted in its subject, although the comparative superficiality of Haste’s work doubtless makes for a smoother read, especially for non-specialists. Nevertheless, Passionate Spirit presents itself as a seriously researched piece of work. Haste claims ‘to have mined in more detail than previous commentators’ Alma’s early diaries (p. xi) while failing to mention that their editor also drew heavily upon them in her own (untranslated) biography. This work does not appear in the bibliography. To her credit, Haste confronts the many unappealing aspects of a personality moulded by grand passions and a brave refusal to accept the norms of a patriarchal society. It would have been hard to ignore Alma’s craving for selfgratification , her jealous urge to be the focus of attention, and a very lusty appetite for alcohol, mischief-making and revenge against any perceived slight. Where Passionate Spirit fails to impress is in its signal ignorance of the German language and the Austrian culture and localities in which Alma was grounded. It grates to read of her songs ‘Einsammer Gang’ and ‘Emtelied’, or that she spent time ‘in the Semmering’ and lived on Vienna’s ‘Elizabethstrasse’. Inevitably, ‘Hoffmansthal’ appears, but the mistranslation of ‘Wiener Stadtund Landesbibliothek’ as ‘Municipal and Rural Library, Vienna’ is a rare gem, unlike The Sisters of Naples for Werfel’s novel Die Geschwister von Neapel. Is it too much to hope that with Passionate Spirit the perceived need for Alma Mahler biographies will now have been sated? For all her artistic potential, Alma was never the ‘prolific composer’ Haste claims her to have been (p. 393), but her role as a vital accessory in the life and work of notably creative men both Jewish and Gentile (Gustav Mahler and Franz Werfel, Oskar Kokoschka and Walter Gropius) is now long established and undisputed. Time then, perhaps, for the first-ever biography of Max Bod, without whom the world would know far less of the genius of both Franz Kafka and Leoš Janáček? Andrew Barker University of Edinburgh Jacques and Jacqueline Groag: Architect and Designer — Two Hidden Figures of the Viennese Modern Movement. By Ursula Prokop. Trans. by Laura McGuire and Jonee Tiedemann. Ed. by Laura McGuire. Los Angeles: DoppelHouse Press, 2019. 272 pp. $39.95. ISBN 9780999754436. Ursula Prokop’s ambitious double biography, a translation of her Germanlanguage version with Böhlau (2005), presents the architect and designer couple Jacques and Jacqueline Groag as seminal, yet hidden, figures in Viennese modernism. Despite their linkages to Secessionist and interwar Vienna’s Reviews 204 most important artistic and cultural luminaries, the Groags’ reputation has faded in the shadow of better-known Viennese ‘superstars’. Including figures also covered in her important Zum jüdischen Erbe in der Wiener Architektur (Vienna, 2016), a panoramic study of the forgotten Jewish contribution to Viennese architecture and design, Prokop’s Groag monograph excavates the couple’s centrality to progressive interwar design in ventures like the 1932 Werkbund Exhibition in Vienna and a series of design exhibitions in post-war Britain, where the couple emigrated after the Anschluss. Groag, born into a well-connected Moravian-Jewish family, served as site architect for the legendary Wittgenstein House and Loos’s Haus Moller, a building notable for its cubic structure interrupted by a protruding window, before developing his own formal vocabulary in a series of commissions in Olmütz, Vienna and the countryside. Informed by a Loosian Raumplan liberating the architect to create free-flowing divisions between rooms, ceilings and stories, and formal ideas from contemporaries like Le Corbusier, Groag’s signature style married modernist formal purity with biomorphic tendencies in floor planning and site construction, including differentiated building heights to suit terrain and the comfortable, light adaptable...