BASH IVAN RAKOCZI was not in himself a particularly important painter to even a very good one but he is an inescapable presence for anybody looking back into Irish art of the 1940s. He was born in London of an English mother and a (reputedly) Hungarian father, and he was one of the assorted bunch of artists who came to Ireland in the shadow of the second World War and formed the nucleus of the White StagGroup. Later he lived in France and Mallorca, and painted up to his death in 1979, aged 71.

Rakoczi was active here when Modernism was still a frail and endangered growth. Plainly he was rather an spirational personality with some organising gifts, interested in setting up discussion groups and in psychonalyis, then relatively novel. It was a tough time and place for a Modernist, but arguably Rakoczki won an identity in Dublin which he could never have achieved in London. There he would simply have been one more so so artist among the hundreds hanging around Fitzroy Square.

Purely as a painter, he was a competent technician with a good colour sense and not much of his own to say. There are obvious echoes of Picasso and Cubism, of Jankel Adler, of the Surrealists, all absorbed into a mildly advanced idiom which is always palatable but never original. Yet obviously he offered hints to other painters for their own development Norah McGuinness, Gerard Dillon, perhaps even William Scott. His style seems to have contained the seeds of plants which he himself never quite managed to grew.

Rakoczi's work after leaving Ireland is rather uninteresting and by the time of his death "he must have been a fringe figure. But his minor place in the growth of Irish Modernism is well treated in Brian Kennedy's interesting catalogue introduction.