Design, Nature, and Revolution: Toward a Critical Ecology

Abstract

ation to reflect on Jacqueline’s late-1940s upholstery designs for Jacques’ furniture, when he had to restrain opulence and conceive more economical designs for the living spaces and furnishings of Britain’s middle class, as well as for collective forms of living. This chapter also addresses Jacques’ diminishing creative opportunities in the 1950s and his progressive mental health challenges. Prokop must be credited for resisting the temptation to establish causality between the two. Jacqueline’s story continues after Jacques’ sudden death: she worked for another twenty-five years and the last chapter also describes her achievements in the designs for abstract textiles and applied textiles for the interiors of ships, trains, and planes. Prokop has gathered an impressive amount of information and presents a thrilling story of the partially forgotten Groags. (A complete list of the Groags’ projects and an accessible bibliography is also useful for resuscitating the pair’s design careers.) Her emphasis on Jacques’ life and career may owe to a lack of historical and archival documents relating to Jacqueline, but still the book might have asked more questions associated with feminist criticism. For example, what obstacles did Jacqueline have to overcome in her career that Jacques did not? How did the imperative of unpaid housework and caretaking in the broader sense, stereotypically assigned to women, influence her career? Attending to these questions might have opened up space for further consideration of the relationship between the couple’s work. For example, considering what collaboration looked like in the day-to-day and how artistic exchange could or did take place might have helped us understand even more about the differences in their bodies of work as well as what connects it, beyond their shared last name.