Jacqueline de Jong, Painter Who Expanded Her Medium, Dies at 85

Jacqueline de Jong, a Dutch painter who for six a long time remained dedicated to figuration, even when the artwork institution didn’t worth it extremely, died on Saturday in Amsterdam following a brief sickness. She was 85.

“Throughout our time working collectively, she was a continuing supply of excellent humor and reducing brilliance,” wrote her New York gallery, Ortuzar Initiatives, in its announcement of her passing. “Her spirit and affect will stay on via her friends, pals, and household, of which we’re honored to be a component.”

De Jong’s topics ranged extensively, from the covers of French pulp fiction novels to billiards, from the Gulf Conflict of the Nineteen Nineties to Israel’s present struggle in Gaza. Throughout her varied our bodies of labor, she challenged the very fundamentals of her medium, portray on unconventional supplies and luring “low” imagery into “excessive” artwork.

For a lot of, her declare to artwork historic fame has lengthy been her ties to the Situationist motion, led by a gaggle of leftist artists and writers who have been lively in Nineteen Sixties France. These artists sought to struggle the cascade of photos that proliferated within the bourgeois mass media; de Jong printed a few of their writings within the Situationist Occasions, a short-lived publication that she based.

However within the later phases of her life, de Jong most popular to speak much less about her Situationist days than what adopted. Talking of her flip towards figuration at a time when abstraction nonetheless reigned supreme, she advised ARTnews earlier this yr, “Individuals like photos, and folks prefer to make photos. Which means artists prefer to make photos. Which suggests figuration was missing.”

A lot of de Jong’s artwork thus positioned a concentrate on figurative imagery, which she appeared to take critically, even when the work itself was humorous. Sly feminist critique programs via a lot of her portray, as does a extra specific antiwar sentiment. However de Jong by no means dedicated to a single model or material, and that was in a roundabout way born of her omnivorous thoughts.

Jacqueline de Jong was born within the Dutch city of Enschede in 1939. Her dad and mom collected works by Kurt Schwitters, Diego Rivera, and others, and that instilled in de Jong a fascination with artwork early on.

As a result of her dad and mom have been Jewish, she was compelled to steer an itinerant childhood, transferring between the Netherlands and Switzerland whereas the specter of the Nazis loomed. After the struggle, throughout the Nineteen Fifties, she studied theater on the Guildhall College in London with plans to turn into an actress. “I completely wished to be on the stage,” she advised Frieze in 2017. “Fortunately, we are able to say, I failed.”

She moved again to Amsterdam and took a part-time job on the Stedelijk Museum, an establishment recognized for its deep holdings of contemporary artwork. This put her on the trail to changing into an artist—and to assembly Asger Jorn, who cofounded CoBrA, an avant-garde motion that upheld infantile, naive painterly methods as a riposte to accepted inventive requirements. The 2 launched into a decade-long romantic relationship. De Jong was 19 on the time; Jorn was greater than 20 years older.

Jorn’s inventive community was wealthy and in depth, and helped put de Jong in touch with Man Debord, a founding member of the Situationist Worldwide. “What I used to be excited about, fairly merely, was altering the world,” de Jong advised Frieze of her involvement with the Situationists.

The artist, who was by then based mostly in Paris, parted methods with the Situationists amid an inside dispute between warring factions inside the motion. Technically, her founding of the Situationist Occasions was a response to being ejected from its ranks. However the publication lasted just a few points as a result of de Jong ran out of cash to proceed printing it.

De Jong’s painterly on the model on the time was CoBrA-like, with work cramped with toothy, monstrous figures jostling in house. However by the tip of the last decade, her figures grew to become extra clearly outlined, and he or she started referring to issues seen in mass media, from dinosaurs to astronauts. Her rejection of abstraction ought to have aligned her with Narrative Figuration, a French motion that positioned an emphasis on allegory, however de Jong felt they didn’t settle for her, since she was a lady. Moreover, she was extra excited about artists like Peter Saul, an American artist whose crass work have been associated to the Pop motion.

Having participated in leftist actions across the time of the Might ’68 protests, de Jong would go on to maneuver to Amsterdam throughout the Seventies. Whereas she had already experimented with multipart work by then, she continued to push that mode even additional, making a collection of works that might even be folded up and toted round à la suitcase. Afterward, she would take a look at the medium much more when she painted on lengthy stretches of sailcloth, exhibiting that the standard oil-on-canvas format was successfully a factor of the previous.

Whereas de Jong is extremely regarded inside the Netherlands, with a few of her work at present on view on the Rijksmuseum, she has solely not too long ago begun to obtain fame overseas. In 2018 Les Abattoirs in Toulouse, France, gave her a retrospective; one other adopted in 2020 on the Stedelijk Museum, and yet one more adopted in 2021 on the WIELS Modern Artwork Centre in Brussels. A survey of her work will seem this yr on the NSU Artwork Museum in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

But even in her remaining years, de Jong appeared unfazed by the renown her artwork had lastly obtained. As she advised ARTnews earlier this yr, “Portray is all the time out of fashion.”