White Stag Group

The White Stag Group centred on a number of British artists who based themselves in Ireland in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s. The main protagonists Rákóczi and Kenneth Hall worked closely together, drawing stimulation from each other and sharing a number of exhibitions at the Fitzroy Street studio in London. In the autumn of 1935 they established the White Stag Group for the advancement of subjectivity in art and psychological analysis, thus bringing together two of Rákóczi's passions as one activity. The arrival of Basil Rákóczi and Kenneth Hall in Ireland created a new, young and energetic centre of attention that was to have a profound effect on the question of art in Ireland. They brought with them the artistic vitality of the Bloomsbury Group, of which they were fringe acolytes in the years preceding World War II.

They represented, and encouraged a move from the academic to modernism, and their "Subjective Art" strongly influenced the work being made at the time by Irish artists such as Louis le Brocquy, May Guinness and Patrick Scott. The White Stag Group was not held together by a stylistic or formulaic theme, it was more a shared, geographical and cerebral collective. Rákóczi and Hall both extrovert, soon gathered around them in Dublin a small circle of friends who shared their interests. As in London they arranged lectures and discussion groups, which were open to all-comers, under the patronage of the Society for Creative Psychology and held exhibitions of paintings under the name of the White Stag Group. Judging by the names of those who were drawn into their company such as Evie Hone, Mainie Jellett, Georgette Rondel, Nano Reid, Doreen Vanston, Thurloe Conolly, Bobby Dawson and Paul Egestorff, to name but a few, they were indeed the centre of the then artists 'moderns' in the Irish capital. Basil Rákóczi and his friends quickly stamped their mark on the Dublin art scene. Dublin clearly provided the sort of atmosphere in which they could thrive and, being the capital of a country neutral in the war, there was in the air a certain intrigue to which Rákóczi and many of his associates with the White Stag Group were not entirely impervious. In 2005 a major retrospective exhibition of the White Stag Group was staged at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin with an accompanying catalogue. The group took its name from the family shield of a patron of the group, critic and writer Herbrand Ingouville-Williams.