Artists
Basil Rakoczi
Basil Rákóczi, landscape, figure and still life painter, was born in Chelsea London. His father was an Hungarian composer, violinist and artist and his mother came from County Cork. After formal art training at Brighton School of Art he studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiére in Paris.
In the late 1920’s he worked as an interior decorator and commercial artist before taking up painting and psychology. In 1935 he founded the Society for Creative Psychology through which he met the artist Kenneth Hall with whom he began to make paintings drawing on the results of their experiments in psychoananlytic techniques. They exhibited these works, which they called ‘subjective’ paintings under the name of the White Stag Group.
In July 1939, as war approached, Rákóczi and Hall moved to Ireland. There the White Stag Group was augmented by the support of other English artists then living in Dublin and Irish artists such as Evie Hone, Mainie Jellett and Patrick Scott. By 1943 some ten exhibitions of twentieth century art had been held at the White Stag Gallery in Dublin.
In the introduction to Three Painters (Dublin,1945) featuring Rákóczi, Hall and Patrick Scott, by Herbrand Ingouville-Williams, the third original member of the White Stag Group, subjective art was described as art ‘drawn from the unconscious by a process which might be described as meditation with paint..’ Rákóczi was quoted: ‘I do not start with a subject; it appears. Even if I think I have the conception in my head, ready to transpose on to the canvas, I find I am wrong. My conceptions must necessarily be modified by the medium and the area…’.
Rákóczi first exhibited with the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1942, and, in all, exhibited ten works there. During the period 1944-’60 he exhibited twenty-six works at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art and abroad including France, Holland and Monaco. In his later years he illustrated several books of poems and other texts, many of which were published in Paris under the imprint of the ‘White Stag Press’.
He died, aged 70, in London in March 1979.
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