Jacques Groag was born to into a Jewish family in Olmütz, Austria-Hungary (now Olomouc, Czech Republic) in 1892, and studied at the Technische Hochschule and Adolf Loos’s architecture school in Vienna. Following the ‘Anschluss’, he immigrated with his wife, textile designer Jacqueline Groag, first to Prague, Czechoslovakia, and then to London. In England, he worked as an interior and furniture designer, and curated a number of important exhibitions, including Britain Can Make It (1946); following a successful career in exile, Groag was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) and a Fellow of the Society of Industrial Artists (FSIAD).
Architect and designer Jacques Groag was born Wilhelm Groag to a wealthy German-Jewish family of malt industrialists in Olmütz, Austria-Hungary (now Olomouc, Czech Republic) in 1892. He trained as a civil engeneer at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna from 1909–14, before attending Adolf Loos’s architecture school, where he was only able to complete his training in 1919 due to the intervening First World War. In 1926 he set up a successful studio in Döbling and subsequently became one of the leading avant-garde architects in Vienna, working on housing projects, private residences and public buildings. One of his architectural achievements was a duplex on Woinovichgasse 5–7 (1930–1). Characterised by pure forms, functionality and optimal use of space, it was widely praised in the press.
In 1937 he married textile designer Hilde Pick, who later changed her name to Jacqueline Groag. Following the ‘Anschluss’ (annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany) in March 1938, the couple fled later the same year to Prague, but after its occupation in 1939 they were forced to leave again, this time for London. The couple settled alongside other émigré tenants in the modernist Isokon Flats (also known as Lawn Road flats), a development designed by Wells Coates for Jack Pritchard, and which opened in 1934 as a progressive experiment in minimalist urban living in Belsize Park, north-west London, an area popular with Jewish and German-speaking refugees. Initially, Groag had serious difficulties in integrating because of his lack of language skills and the general wartime reduction in construction activity, and was only able to work as an interior and furniture designer. He was involved in the Utility Furniture program, a project ran by Sir Gordon Russell and launched by the British government for the serial production of functional furniture for the English market to meet the huge demands due to bomb damage caused by the Blitz. Following a proposal first advocated in 1944 by Architectural Review to preserve bombed churches as war memorials, in 1945 Groag presented a project to retain the ruins of St Anne's Church, Soho, destroyed during the Blitz, and incorporate them in a war memorial shrine and garden (Architects' Journal, 14 June 1945, pp. 441-444). However, the remains were eventually demolished in the early 1950s.
After the Second World War, Groag embarked on a series of successful collaborations with his wife on a number of exhibitions, such as Modern Homes (1946). Organised and curated by Groag, it featured his ‘one room living’ solutions from the Vienna interwar period. Later that year, he was the main exhibition designer in the furniture and textiles section of the landmark exhibition Britain Can Make It held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1946. The Groags designed large wall panels, and Jacqueline’s textiles were draped as spatial divisions. The same year he wrote The Story of Furniture which he co-wrote with Sir Gordon Russell (Penguin, 1946). Gorag's illustrations of residential interiors featured several of his own furniture designs and built-in furniture pieces from his past projects in Olomouc and Vienna.
In 1950 a walnut and sycamore dining suite manufactured by the Scottish firm of Joseph Johnstone and designed by Groag was included in the British Furniture Trades Exhibition held at Earl's Court. Groag also designed furniture for the Scottish Furniture Manufacturers Ltd, among them a storage chest made of mahogany with decorative figured diamond-shaped veneers. With its unconventional design, this piece was ‘a fine example of the quality and craftsmanship that had been the watchword of Scottish furniture since the nineteenth century’ (Cooper 2008, p. 17). The most important collaboration, however, in the Groags’ career was for the nationwide Festival of Britain in 1951. They were tasked by the Council of Industrial Design with the creation of the information kiosk and also designed the visual trademark for the festival office on Regent Street in central London. As a side activity, Jacques Groag taught at Hammersmith School for Arts and Crafts.
Prone to bouts of depression, over his later years he took up painting, spending significant time on Hampstead Heath, inspired by the landscape, and also producing portraits. In 1948 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) and in 1952 a Fellow of the Society of Industrial Artists (FSIAD). By 1959 the Groags were living in a regency house in St. John’s Wood, which they fully transformed into a modernist home. Jacques Groag died in London, England in 1962, unexpectedly of a heart attack while sitting on a London bus to the way to the opera. Fellow émigré architect Stefan Buzas gave a memorial lecture on Groag's life and work at the Royal Society of Arts. In the UK, Groag’s archive is held in the Victoria and Albert Museum's Archive of Art and Design. In 2020 an exhibition devoted to the Groags’ lives and careers was held at the Isokon Gallery in London.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Jacques Groag]
Publications related to [Jacques Groag] in the Ben Uri Library