Self-taught Dutch painter, sculptor, and graphic artist Jacqueline de Jong, known for her inextinguishable commitment to figuration and for founding the landmark periodical the Situationist Times, died June 29 in Amsterdam following a brief illness. She was eighty-five. Unfettered by concerns regarding convention and acutely interested in the world around her, De Jong over the course of a six-decade career drew from movements including Cobra, Pop, Expressionism, and New Figuration to create widely diverse works that addressed a battery of subjects, ranging from dissolute billiard players to travel-weary immigrants, and a constellation of emotions, humor, despair, rage, and desire among them. Despite the shattered-mirror style of her approach, her oeuvre was unified by a profoundly evident sense of compassion for the human condition. “My empathy with the world and what is happening in the world is still going on and I’m expressing it,” she told Studio International in 2021. “My style has been changing a lot, but not that.”
Jacqueline de Jong was born February 3, 1939, in the Dutch industrial town of Hengelo to Jewish parents. Following the German invasion of the Netherlands, De Jong fled with her mother to Switzerland, where the pair were temporarily separated, as housing for both was unavailable. De Jong created what she described to the New York Times as her “first really interesting work,” an abstract pastel, at the age of four, while living in a children’s home. Reunited, mother and daughter following the cessation of World War II returned to the Netherlands, where young Jacqueline’s ability to reintegrate was hampered by her inability to speak Dutch. She continued to make art as a teen, her paintings at this time influenced by the techniques and hues favored by Russian-born French abstractionist Nicolas de Staël.
In 1957, after graduating from the Gemeentelijk Lyceum in nearby Enschede, De Jong moved to Paris, where she worked at the Christian Dior boutique while studying French and drama. Following a brief stint at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, she moved to Amsterdam, taking a job at the Stedelijk Museum and returning her focus from acting to painting. In 1959, she met and became involved with fiery Danish painter Asger Jorn, more than twenty years her senior, who in the previous decade had cofounded the avant-garde movements Cobra, International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, and, most recently, with Guy Debord, the Situationist International. De Jong joined the Situationist International in 1960, becoming only one of two female members of the group (the other was Debord’s then-wife Michèle Bernstein). She moved to Paris that same year and began assisting Dutch Cobra artist Karel Appel, whose style she keenly observed while continuing painting on her own, her works of this period featuring monstrous, animal-like forms and bright hues.
By 1962, Debord had decreed the making of art a commercial enterprise and thus outside the remit of the Situationist International, and Jorn and De Jong were cast out from the group. The moment proved catalyzing for De Jong, who sold her first work that same year. “You know when I became professional?” she told the Times. “When I got thrown out of the Situationist.”
In retaliation, De Jong launched the experimental publication Situationist Times, printing it in the apartment she shared with Jorn and cramming each issue with images, essays and artworks that addressed ideas such as spectacle culture and politics and pushed back against the totalizing force of the SI with its own weapons: detournement and a printed form of dérive. “I started the Situationist Times as a platform for us to share our work, in dialogue with one another,” she told BOMB magazine in 2019. “Unlike a group publication with blank pages to fill, the Situationist Times had a clear focus, with each issue focusing on shapes, such as the knot or labyrinth. But free of interpretation and without any rules.” De Jong would edit the journal for five years before shutting it down in 1967 owing to a lack of funds.
In 1970, her affair with Jorn over and the protests of May ’68, for which she designed and printed flyers, in the rearview mirror, she moved back to Amsterdam, which she would call home for the rest of her life. Now far beyond Cobra and the SI, she abandoned her work of the 1960s, which had focused on lightning-bolt violence such as suicides and car crashes, in favor of the straight-ahead figuration of the 1970s, as embodied for example by her 1976–79 series “Billiards.” Writing of the paintings in a 2022 issue of Artforum, Mara Hoberman noted the artist’s shift from expressionistically applied impasto to slicker, more subtle brushwork, writing, “In addition to providing de Jong with an erotic subtext, billiards—a game where colorful forms are pushed around on a flat surface with a wooden implement—inspired a whole new painterly approach.”
The 1980s brought a fascination with war and with surrounds both urban and natural, fervently illustrated. “[De Jong’s] chimerical figures evoke a polymorphic perversity; as with those of her compatriot Hieronymus Bosch, their liberatory zeal veers toward the monstrous and carnivalesque,” wrote Patrick Price in 2019 for Artforum.com. In recent years, De Jong turned her attention to the crisis of global migration brought about by climate change. “My work is almost all about refugees and immigrants [right now], but that doesn’t help anything to change the world,” she told Cultured magazine earlier this year. “I try to [make it impactful] so people will at least look.”
Despite her many accomplishments and the length of her career, De Jong only began to gain broad international recognition toward the end of her life. Recent retrospectives include those at Les Abattoirs in Toulouse, France (2018); the Stedelijk Museum (2019) and Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2021). The first institutional US survey of her work is set to open this fall at the NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. A solo gallery exhibition is currently on view through July 10 at London’s Pippy Houldsworth Gallery.
De Jong’s papers are in the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. Her work is held in the collections of numerous museums around the world, including the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Rijksmuseum and Stedelijk Museum, both in Amsterdam; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Lenbachhaus, Munich; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania.
