Jacqueline de Jong, painter who expanded the possibilities of her art, dies at 85

Jacqueline de Jong, a Dutch painter who devoted six decades to figurative painting, even when the art world did not value it highly, died Saturday in Amsterdam after a short illness. She was 85.

“During our collaboration, she was a constant source of good humor and brilliance,” her New York gallery, Ortuzar Projects, wrote in its death notice. “Her spirit and influence will live on through her peers, friends, and family, of whom we are honored to be a part.”

De Jong’s subjects range from the covers of popular French novels to billiards, from the Gulf War of the 1990s to Israel’s current war in Gaza. In her various works, she has questioned the very foundations of her art, painting on unconventional materials and transforming “low” images into “high” art.

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For many, his fame in art history has long been due to his connections with the Situationist movement, led by a group of left-wing artists and writers active in France in the 1960s. These artists sought to combat the cascade of images that proliferated in the bourgeois mass media; de Jong published some of their writings in the The Situationist Timesa short-lived publication she founded.

But in the last years of her life, de Jong preferred to speak less of her Situationist years than of what followed. Discussing her turn to figuration at a time when abstraction still reigned supreme, she said: ARTnews “People like pictures and like to make pictures. Which means that artists like to make pictures. Which means that figuration was lacking.”

De Jong’s art, then, emphasized figurative imagery, which she seemed to take seriously, even when the work itself was humorous. A sly feminist critique permeates much of her painting, as does a more explicit anti-war sentiment. But De Jong never committed herself to a single style or subject, and this was in some ways born of her omnivorous mind.

Jacqueline de Jong was born in the Dutch city of Enschede in 1939. Her parents collected works by Kurt Schwitters, Diego Rivera and others, which instilled in de Jong a fascination with art from an early age.

Her parents were Jewish, so she had to live a nomadic childhood, between the Netherlands and Switzerland, while the Nazi threat loomed. After the war, in the 1950s, she studied drama at the Guildhall School in London with the intention of becoming an actress. “I really wanted to be on stage,” she said. Curly in 2017. “Fortunately, I can say that I failed.”

She returned to Amsterdam and took a part-time job at the Stedelijk Museum, an institution known for its extensive collections of modern art. This set her on the path to becoming an artist and meeting Asger Jorn, co-founder of CoBrA, an avant-garde movement that championed childlike, naïve painting techniques in response to accepted artistic norms. The two embarked on a romantic relationship that lasted ten years. De Jong was 19 at the time; Jorn was more than 20 years older.

Jorn’s artistic network was rich and extensive, and it brought de Jong into contact with Guy Debord, a founding member of the Situationist International. “What interested me, quite simply, was changing the world,” de Jong said. Curly of his commitment to the situationists.

The artist, who was then living in Paris, split from the Situationists following an internal conflict between the movement’s warring factions. Technically, her foundation The Situationist Times was a response to his expulsion from its ranks. But the publication lasted only a few issues because de Jong no longer had the money to continue printing it.

At the time, De Jong’s painting style was close to that of CoBrA, with paintings filled with monstrous, toothy figures jostling through space. But by the end of the decade, her figures had become more clearly defined, and she began to reference objects seen in mass media, from dinosaurs to astronauts. Her rejection of abstraction should have aligned her with narrative figuration, a French movement that emphasized allegory, but De Jong felt that they wouldn’t accept her because she was a woman. In addition, she was more interested in artists like Peter Saul, an American artist whose crude paintings have been linked to the Pop movement.

Having been involved in the left-wing movements around the time of the May 68 protests, de Jong moved to Amsterdam in the 1970s. While she had already experimented with painting in parts by then, she continued to push this mode even further, creating a series of works that could even be folded and carried in a suitcase. Later, she would experiment with the medium even further by painting on long strips of sailcloth, proving that the traditional format of oil on canvas was indeed a thing of the past.

While de Jong is well-known in the Netherlands (some of her paintings are currently on display at the Rijksmuseum), she has only recently begun to gain recognition abroad. In 2018, Les Abattoirs in Toulouse, France, held a retrospective of her work, followed in 2020 at the Stedelijk Museum, and another in 2021 at WIELS, a contemporary art center in Brussels. A retrospective of her work will be presented this year at the NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Yet even in her later years, de Jong seemed unperturbed by the fame her art had finally received. As she put it ARTnews Earlier this year, “Painting is still out of fashion.”