Dutch artist Jacqueline de Jong, known for her role in the radical international Situationist movement and her contributions to avant-garde imagery, died on June 29 at the age of 85. Her New York gallery Ortuzar Projects and Paris gallery Galerie Allen confirmed her death, noting that she died surrounded by her family after a brief illness.
Born in 1939 in Hengelo, the Netherlands, to a Jewish family, de Jong grew up traumatized by World War II. After the German invasion of the Netherlands, her family was forced into hiding. Her family managed to escape the Germans and were saved by the French Resistance. After the war, she and her family returned to the Netherlands, then moved to Paris in 1957 to work in a Christian Dior boutique.
She moved to London to study drama briefly at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama before returning to Amsterdam in the late 1950s to work at the Stedelijk Museum. Soon after, in 1959, she met the Danish painter Asger Jorn, co-founder of the CoBrA movement, who became her long-term lover and a major influence on her work.
In 1960, de Jong joined the International Situationist Movement, a group of artists and writers seeking to break with the social status quo. She remained committed to the movement’s revolutionary goals until she was removed from office two years later due to internal disagreements. However, in protest, she founded the left-wing publication Situationist InternationalThroughout the 1960s she remained active in various left-wing movements, notably participating in the May 1968 protests in Paris.
De Jong’s style is clearly influenced by the Cobra movement’s emphasis on raw and expressive forms. Over the decades, her work has evolved from narrative figuration to more abstract multi-part paintings. Her paintings range in subject matter from French pulp fiction to erotica to current sociopolitical crises, often challenging traditional forms and experimenting with unconventional materials and techniques. Her figurative works are often humorous and full of pointed social, feminist and anti-war criticism. Her two parallel series, “Accidental Paintings” and “Suicide Paintings,” are perhaps the best examples of the artist balancing violent and humorous themes.
For most of her life, de Jong was known almost exclusively in the Netherlands and Europe. However, her international reputation began to grow later in her career, particularly after a retrospective at the Musee Les Abattoirs in Toulouse, France in 2018 and a survey exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2019. Around this time, she began exhibiting at taste galleries, including Chateau Shatto in Los Angeles, Pippy Houldsworth in London, and Rodolphe Janssen in Brussels. In 2021, she had another touring institutional solo exhibition, opening at the WIELS Center for Contemporary Art in Brussels. In 2024, she has already had solo exhibitions at Ortuzar Projects, Galerie Lelong & Co., and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery. Her work will be on view at the NSU Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in November 2024.
