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Benny Rakoczi and Kenneth Hall had arrived in Dublin together in the early spring of 1940. Through their regular exhibitions, attending other shows and generally entering into the social life on offer, Benny and Kenneth soon become ‘known’ in the city. Over the months and years they were to spend there, Benny became good friends with the writer and historian Dorothy Macardle, as well as the writer Elizabeth Bowen. Of Bowen, Benny wrote, “We talked of art, of Duncan Grant and Augustus John, her recollections of Virginia Wolff and of Vanessa Bell and Angelica, of Fitzroy and No. 8, and Soho and Bloomsbury. It was entrancing to meet her.” Together, Benny and Kenneth chatted over tea with the Irish political leader Eamonn de Valera; they met literary figures including T.S. Elliott and Patrick Kavanagh; Benny spent an afternoon with Jack Yeats and his wife; and some time with Evie Hone, who seemed to have a true soft spot for the two men.  

Kenneth was the quieter lynchpin behind the more gregarious Benny. Just occasionally, when wearied, he would heave a sigh at meeting yet more new folk, reminded of the words of, he believed, Isherwood, “Every new friend you make means one less painting done in your life.”  Benny found that meeting people brought out a spark in him, intensified his desire to paint and be creative.

The war intruded but a little into Benny and Kenneth’s lives. One day, in January 1941, a wounded German plane came limping over Dublin and, to declared intentions, the gunners in Phoenix Park took aim at the stricken plane. Being attacked, the plane jettisoned its remaining bombs, hitting a poor area of the city. Having previously delivered a lecture on the psychology of bombs falling, Benny felt he should put into practice what he preached. The first thing he did was to keep people calm who had come out into the street by making tea for everyone. He checked on old Mrs Higgins, his landlady, in the basement. He went up to the roof and looked out but saw nothing unusual. In fact, there had been a few bombs dropped in south Dublin and no fatalities were recorded on this night. Stories they heard of the London Blitz from people who had fled were beyond sad and fueled the fears of Dubliners. Later that year, in May, bombs were dropped in north Dublin and 28 people were reported killed. This proved to be a rare event.

Notwithstanding these worries about the war, Benny and Kenneth’s vibrant artistic output inspired important developments in the work of both men. Their work, and some of the others in the White Stag Group, was heavily influenced by drawing up art from the unconscious and, as far as possible, holding the conscious world in voluntary abeyance. Subjective expressionism, which was the label both artists acquired, meant painting from the heart, the soul and the subconscious; what appeared on the canvas could be interpreted afterwards. They both passionately believed this was a more honest approach to painting.

During this time, Benny moved away from depicting more traditional landscapes towards a greater focus on the theme of war. In doing this, he developed one of his signature painting styles. He would create his painting, on paper with ink and watercolour and then, when dried, he would use a razor to scrape away at it. This would give it an almost fuzzy appearance, as if it were slightly out of focus. It was a textural look. This technique first became evident in a small watercolour Benny painted in early 1941, showing a man who had been bayonetted in the belly.  

With this technique, Benny began to develop a different way of representing human figures. These figures would subsequently appear in his paintings very regularly through his different experiments with art. In fact, he continued with this signature style up to when he could no longer paint due to ill health. Initially, Benny saw these figures as sad souls “caught between earth and a heavenly world by the trammels of illusion that bring this world to suffer the disasters of war”. The continuing impact of the war was meeting up with a spiritualty within his art. At first, Benny called these figures his 'lantern ghosts,' because their heads resembled square paper lanterns and the method of colouring meant it looked as if they were glowing from within. He later referred to them as his ‘wooks’ or ‘wookies’. 

Increasingly, Benny’s works emerged from meditating on the shape he was trying to depict. Through meditation, he found, the texture and the colours of the painting emerged. The work was therefore not planned. In this approach, Benny believed he was following Cezanne, who believed that the key to great art was "meditation brush in hand." By this method, he felt that art was purged of inessentials and superficially attractive. Once he had created the foundation of a picture, he would stand back and look to interpret its meaning. A revelation of an unconscious truth may have appeared through the hidden content of the mind. He would then add to the painting to embellish its meaning. This is what he meant by subjectivism in art, and he used this approach regularly in his ‘wook’ paintings.

Benny also, it must be said, painted more realistic scenes of Dublin during this time. Washing hanging out to dry in a narrow city street; a young man leaning on a lamp post; children playing in the street; an old woman looking tired; life paintings.

This reflected the two sides to Benny’s painting. He was influenced by many different artists. He would paint a Nature Morte in the morning and an ethereal ‘wook’ in the afternoon. He enjoyed painting with a knife, sometimes doing outlines with a nail file, as much as he enjoyed his brushwork.

Benny’s two styles of art were mirrored in other aspects of his life. As well as two types of painting with knife and brush, he did two types of work, art and psychoanalysis. He had two sides to his mind, mystical and sceptic. Two types of lifestyle, bohemian and ‘a monsieur’. And two types of love, man and woman. He would regularly feature contrast in his paintings, sometimes as the main theme, other times more hidden. In fact, opposites regularly featured in his work. He liked to paint with an aim of unifying these opposites. This reflects a pattern in Benny’s painting, with some works reflecting his inner world and others depicting his immediate, real, surroundings. And, invariably, experiencing new things and meeting new people led to an upsurge in his creativity.

Kenneth put his heart and soul into the art exhibitions. He was the engine for a lot of the shows, keeping himself busy by framing, mounting and hanging pictures, as well as advertising. He would not get a paid job. He had tried once, back in London before the War, and it did not work for him. He sometimes liked to sit and just do nothing.

Kenneth saw being an artist as sometimes “doing nothing”. He continued to love the concept of being an artist, writing: “For me it was to be an artist and what I knew as an artist would be in my art, that and life and living and loving, as an artist not as anything else.”

This was perhaps a self-justification for his lifestyle, but it made sense. He loved art, so why not be an artist? This was a European outlook, not an English one. He felt his own painting developed slowly at first in Dublin, eventually writing; “my paintings started expressing themselves. It was abstract and it was subjective.” It was in this phase that bold colour featured more strongly in Kenneth’s art. He began painting his brightly coloured drawings of trains, fishes and boats, a cultivated naïve art. And his painting moved from expressing itself to expressing himself.

Benny and Kenneth’s artistic development during this time was a product both of the enthusiasm they encountered for their work in Dublin, which continued to bring out new ideas in their art, as well as of the experimentation with different techniques and styles that they had tried over the years. It was also a product of their shared love for art and for each other, which continued, at this time at least, to provide mutual inspiration.  

The struggle to accept modern art and its meaning within a changing world, particularly in a predominantly conservative Irish art scene, was an issue that all of the White Stag artists had to face. Reviewing the work of the group, one writer acknowledged that, “the workings of the subconscious mind and of the imagination provide a field of greater scope than reality” but went on to write: “it is surprisingly easy to tire of the unending stream of Euclidean diagrams, grinning grotesquely distorted faces, here-a-daub, there-a-daub colour splashes and the rest, of every modern art show.” Surely these modern artists, the journalist wrote, could “do something a little more ordinary for a change?”

While the White Stag Group’s early shows had been warmly praised in the press, the boundary-pushing in their art received more mixed reviews in the shows to follow. In October 1941 Kenneth held a one-man show. It was his first such show in Dublin and was a bold move. To continue the continental theme of their previous exhibition, Kenneth decided to present the catalogue for the show in French, perhaps wanting to emphasize again the importance of European influences in modern art. His paintings at this show were certainly challenging and featured his new, more expressionist, free-flow style of painting that he had developed over the previous year.  Many of the paintings had no titles at all, but a few were named in French, which confounded reviewers. There were no written notes from Kenneth about each piece, a deliberate move by him.

While Kenneth’s close friends, and many other artists, saw in him a huge talent, the press coverage of his one-man show was, this time, not kind. The Evening Mail described “monotonous and constant fidelity to certain basic forms”; the Irish Times saw the paintings as showing a “harmonic disposition of colours with a determined avoidance of artistic achievement.” The Irish Press was less critical, but stated “these works do not represent forms in the ordinary sense, if they give satisfaction it is as ideas that must be worked out, and not to the eye.” In a curious way, this criticism would have been expected and even welcomed by Kenneth and Benny. Breaking new boundaries would inevitably upset traditionalists. Underneath, though, these comments would have hurt the sensitive Kenneth.

These were exciting times for Benny and Kenneth. They turned their attention to a key aim of the White Stag Group; to develop an artists’ centre, a place where like-minded, struggling artists could meet, paint and exchange ideas and views. It was called The White Stag Gallery and would be open to all, including the general public. Its home, they decided, would be 6, Lower Baggot Street. This was markedly different from Fitzrovia in London from before the War where the group, as has been seen, were far more inward-looking. The first exhibition at this venue was a small show in February 1941, featuring just five artists (Benny, Kenneth, Patrick Scott, Stephen Gilbert and the sculptor Jocelyn Chewett) with 21 pieces on display. This was an unusual show in that it was only open for one day.

Benny painted what was to become one of his most important paintings. Entitled The Prisoner, it expresses many ideas that were conflicts for him at this time: the confines of working in Dublin, which he loved for sure, but also was restrictive in many ways; the repercussions of a world war dictating everyone’s life; the restrictions that being bisexual or homosexual placed on the individual; his personal conflict between the deep love for one person against the fear of commitment that this entails; feeling caught by Kenneth’s growing neediness and illnesses. The Prisoner was about all these things, all this trappedness. It is currently on show at Towner, as part of the concurrent exhibitions Lucy Wertheim: A Life in Art & Reuniting the Twenties Group. Lucy Wertheim, who had known both Benny and Kenneth from London in the 1930’s, had kept in regular contact with them both throughout the War years.

Benny had been prolific in his work over the summer of 1944, and a number of pieces would be showcased in a solo exhibition later in the autumn. Pat Mullen, author of Man of Aran (1934), kindly penned a foreword to the exhibition in the catalogue. The show was a success, selling 10 out of the 16 works Benny hung. Kenneth put on a solo show too; his second. This received far more positive feedback than his first! The reviewers described his work as "flowing agreeably," "tasteful" and having a "remarkable impact on the imagination."

Benny and Kenneth remained with each other and continued painting until, so sadly, Kenneth took his own life in London in July 1946. The two men had been discussing plans for a future together in the weeks and months before his death. They had a big ambition to set up home together in Paris and open a studio and expand the ethos of the White Stag Group. It was now not to be. 

Benny took many years to recover from Kenneth’s death but he did eventually make Paris his home and he did eventually acquire his own studio in the early 1950’s. The influences the two men had on each other’s work had been immense and, whilst Benny continued to experiment with new styles and methods, the influence of Kenneth remained within him. I am sure that would have been reciprocal had Kenneth survived.