Jacqueline de Jong, the Dutch artist and an influential figure of the 1960s avant garde, has died at the age of 85.
Known primarily for her paintings, De Jong also turned her radical outlook towards sculpture, printmaking, publishing and jewellery. Her work, which dealt with violence and eroticism – and engaged fully with the revolutionary politics of the era – earned her a reputation as one of the 20th century’s bravest and most honest autobiographical artists. When, at the opening of Tracey Emin’s Dutch retrospective in 2003, de Jong fell into Emin’s infamous tent artwork Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, the Guardian called it “an entirely appropriate, if unintentional, homage.”
De Jong was born in the Dutch town of Hengelo in 1939 to Jewish parents. During the second world war, she fled with her mother to Switzerland – helped over the border by the resistance after briefly being captured by the French police, who were planning to deport them to the notorious Drancy internment camp. She had originally planned on becoming an actor, going so far as to train at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama. But her artistic journey took decisive turns after meeting Danish painter and founder of the Cobra group Asger Jorn in 1959 – they later had a tumultuous 10-year love affair – and joining Guy Debord’s provocative Situationist International a year later. After being expelled from the latter group, she responded by editing and publishing the experimental Situationist Times between 1962 and 1967, providing an important space for writers, poets and visual artists to collaborate.
During this time she was exhibiting her work across Europe. Her series Accidental Paintings and Suicidal Paintings combined violence with humour, but De Jong was not committed to genre. She moved from abstract expressionism to figurative paintings and back again, while addressing everything from war and sexual desire (most notably in her humorous 1966 series Private Lives of Cosmonauts) to billiard players (in the 1970s) and misshapen potatoes (2010s). She also produced and distributed posters while marching during the civil unrest of May 1968 in Paris.
In 2009, with her second husband Thomas H Weyland, she started The Weyland de Jong Foundation, which supports avant-garde artists, architects and art-scientists aged 50 and over. A decade later, she received the outstanding merit Aware prize – a French award for women artists – in recognition of a six-decade career that remained radical to the end.
Talking to Frieze in 2017, she expressed a desire to have the Situationist Times digitised and made available online. “I think, at this moment in particular, we need to be reminded to be disobedient,” she said.
Jacqueline de Jong: La petit mort is at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, until 10 July
