Basil Rakoczi
Basil Rakoczi was born in London to Irish Hungarian parentage and studied art at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris. He developed a lifelong interest in both painting and psychology and established the Society for Creative Psychology in the early 1930s which centred around group therapy and psychoanalysis. In 1935, he met Kenneth Hall (1913-1946) with whom he established the White Stag Group. As pacifists the group found refuge in a neutral Ireland during the war years of 1930s and 40s and in exchange brought with it a new energy of debate around the practice of art. The group had long lasting effects within the Irish art scene and accelerated a move away from academism into modernism.
His work belies his gypsy and Celtic roots at different periods of his radically diverse output, all the while maintaining a distinctly modernist vocabulary in his gouache, oil, watercolour or ceramic artworks. His primary concern was consistently the exploration of psychology through his work and he was absorbed by the theme of the human condition. An artist of impressive energy, he travelled extensively in Europe, Egypt and India and was above all, a humanist.
His work is in a number of important collections internationally including University of Sussex, Derby City Art Gallery, Manchester City Art Gallery, Dublin's Trinity College, the Ulster Museum in Belfast, the Queensland Australia National Collection and Auckland City Art Gallery.
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His work belies his gypsy and Celtic roots at different periods of his radically diverse output, all the while maintaining a distinctly modernist vocabulary in his gouache, oil, watercolour or ceramic artworks. His primary concern was consistently the exploration of psychology through his work and he was absorbed by the theme of the human condition. An artist of impressive energy, he travelled extensively in Europe, Egypt and India and was above all, a humanist.
His work is in a number of important collections internationally including University of Sussex, Derby City Art Gallery, Manchester City Art Gallery, Dublin's Trinity College, the Ulster Museum in Belfast, the Queensland Australia National Collection and Auckland City Art Gallery.
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