Jacqueline de Jong, the Dutch artist famous for her provocative contributions to the European avant-garde in the 1960s, has died aged 85 following a cancer diagnosis last month.
Best known as a painter of macabre and often surreal humour, with an idiosyncratic, expressionistic style, De Jong’s career was distinguished by her appetite for experimentation. Over six decades, she worked in sculpture, jewellery and graphic design, reflecting on themes of war and violence, sex and death. Nonsensical but suggestive titles like Suicidal Paintings, or Sneaky Guardian, were as much a product of her anarchic wit as Pommes de Jong (2007 onwards)—earrings and other pieces of jewellery created by gold-plating potato tubers.
De Jong was born in Hengelo in 1939, her Jewish art collector parents the owners of “the only Willem de Kooning in private hands in the Netherlands”, she told Frieze in 2017. In 1942, De Jong escaped the Nazi occupation and found refuge in her mother’s native Switzerland. By the time they returned to the Netherlands in 1946, De Jong had to relearn Dutch.
Still, De Jong was reluctant to connect her own experiences to the recurrence of war as a theme in her work, which in the past two years has focused on the plight of refugees in Gaza and Ukraine. “If you want to make an interpretation like that, you’re free to do so,” she told me in what may have been her final interview, published by The New European. “Don’t forget, I was three years of age so I don’t have any memories. … I want to paint people or things more universal than my own person.”
De Jong’s ambitions were originally focused on the stage, and in 1958 she went to study at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London. By the autumn she was back in Amsterdam, where a job in the industrial design department of the Stedelijk Museum sparked a growing interest in graphics. It was around this time that she met the Danish painter and founder of the international avant-garde group CoBrA, Asger Jorn, some 25 years her senior, with whom she would have a ten-year relationship.
Back in Paris, De Jong and Jorn joined forces with Situationist International, a libertarian Marxist group led, somewhat ironically, by the authoritarian figure of Guy Debord. By 1963, De Jong and a number of others were expelled by Debord, because, De Jong told me, he disapproved of them selling their work. De Jong’s response was to edit and publish six editions of The Situationist Times, a key moment in magazine history, in which De Jong presented herself as the true guardian of Situationist principles. The Situationists’ anti-capitalist, leftist ideals were powerful undercurrents in the Paris uprising of 1968, for which De Jong designed and distributed posters.
Despite her madcap, if gentle demeanour, when I met De Jong over a video link a few weeks before her death on 29 June, the steely pragmatism that had driven her success was as forcefully present as ever. Though she insisted that “I have never been harmed, as an artist, by the fact that I’m a woman”, she was faced with uniquely female dilemmas: “I’m not a hobbyist”, she told me, “It would have been a sacrifice to have a family.”
After the end of her relationship with Jorn in 1970, she married twice, first to Hans Brinkman and then to Thomas H. Weyland who died in 2009. Recent years had brought considerable if belated acclaim, and in May 2023 she was named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, receiving in 2019 the Outstanding Merit Award from the Aware Prize for Women Artists in recognition of her exceptional career. Her archive was acquired by Yale University in 2011, and a major history of The Situationist Times, coinciding with a project to make the magazines available online, has ensured its place in art history. Her current exhibition La Petite Mort, continues at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London until 10 July, and includes new works alongside pieces from the 1960s.
