Coinciding with Kunsttage Basel, Meyer Riegger’s exhibition at Galerie Mueller honors the late Dutch artist Jacqueline de Jong (1939–2024), who passed away at 85. Spanning over six decades, de Jong’s work oscillated between Abstract Expressionism, New Figuration, and Pop Art, exploring themes of violence, humor, eroticism, and everyday banality. Born into a Jewish family in Enschede, she fled to Switzerland during WWII, returning to the Netherlands post-war. Her multilingualism and adaptability mirrored her artistic versatility, incorporating pop culture, politics, and art historical references into her works.
De Jong’s career was marked by her engagement with the Situationist International, leading her to create *The Situationist Times* after being expelled from the group. Her art often reflected the Situationist concepts of ‘détournement’ and ‘dérive’, evident in her diverse media from paintings to protest posters and artist books. She also integrated unconventional materials like dried potatoes into her later works, showcasing her playful yet profound approach to art.
Her unconventional path included stints in Paris, where she worked for Christian Dior and with Cobra painter Karel Appel, and in London before joining the Stedelijk Museum. De Jong’s influence is recognized posthumously with a retrospective at NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale in November 2024, highlighting her significant contributions to modern art. Her work, known for its shape-shifting nature, continues to inspire through its bold exploration of form and content.
Meyer Riegger, Basel c/o Galerie Mueller (Rebgasse 46). August 30, 2024.
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Exhibition text (excerpt):
This year at Kunsttage Basel we open a solo exhibition with works by the Dutch artist Jacqueline de Jong (1939–2024), who sadly recently passed away at the age of 85. During a career spanning more than six decades, de Jong explored violence, humour, eroticism and the banality of human existence. She is best known for her paintings, which range in form from Abstract Expressionism to New Figuration and Pop Art.
De Jong was born in the Dutch city of Enschede in 1939 to a Jewish family of art collectors. During the war, she fled to Switzerland with her family as an infant. When she returned to the Netherlands shortly after the end of the war, de Jong had to relearn her mother tongue. Just as de Jong adapted to new contexts and learnt languages at a young age – she later spoke five fluently – she also switched between different mediums and styles with nonchalant ease. She borrowed her themes from the worlds of pop culture, entertainment and political reporting – on the Gulf War, for example – and made overt references to the works of other artists such as Francisco de Goya, R. B. Kitaj and Francis Bacon.
Curator Alison M. Gingeras described de Jong’s artistic shape-shifting as ‘perpetual migration as situation’ – a tendency to effortlessly cross boundaries and take on new perspectives with relish. The scale of her works also varies, from small diptychs and handwritten diaries to monumental canvases dominated by an absurd, often wild and sensual world which is populated by creatures resembling humans, animals and monsters.
De Jong designed protest posters for the 1968 revolts in Paris; she also made drawings, created artist’s books, sculptures and sculptural paintings, such as her diptychs from the 1970s, which can be folded up like suitcases and taken along when travelling. Later, she not only integrated the monstrous and exaggerated forms of potatoes into her paintings, but also designed jewellery using the dried tubers from her garden and integrated photographs and plant matter into her mixed-media works.
The artist’s unconventional educational path also proves her ability to embrace the new: rather than art, she studied drama, art history and French; she lived in Paris – where she worked for Christian Dior and later as an assistant to the Cobra painter Karel Appel – and in London, followed by a period of employment at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
At the age of twenty, de Jong met Asger Jorn, an artist who co-founded the Cobra movement. During their romantic relationship, she crossed paths with other avant-garde artists, including Guy Debord, a founding member of the Situationist International, a left-wing French group that opposed the flood of images in the bourgeois mass media. When Debord expelled all visual artists from the movement in 1962, de Jong responded by launching the English-language magazine The Situationist Times from her Paris flat. She dedicated each of the six issues to a motif related to the Situationist theme of ‘dérive’ (drift): labyrinths, knots, rings, and so on. These ‘topologies’ are alternative forms of knowledge – systems that function not in the realm of logic, but in that of paradoxes, misunderstandings and contradictions.
When de Jong described the Situationist International movement in a letter from 1964, she named ‘détournement’ (diversion), ‘dérive’ (drift) and ‘modification’ as its most important tools. These methods also shaped her own approach to the very end: in her paintings, she effortlessly emphasised the eroticism of billiard games, saw the humorous side of crime stories, and covered shrivelled potatoes with precious gold. De Jong additionally knew how to take advantage of the fact that her work only gained wider recognition later in her career: ‘My function as an “undercover” in art is to discover and modify all universal experience to my own gusto.’
Jacqueline de Jong (1939–2024) lived and worked between Amsterdam in the Netherlands and in the Bourbonnais region of France. In November 2024, the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale will present the first retrospective of de Jong’s work in the USA. Recent solo museum exhibitions include The Ultimate Kiss at WIELS, Brussels (2021), which was also shown at MOSTYN, Wales (2021/22) and the Kunstmuseum Ravensburg (2022); Pinball Wizard: The Work and Life of Jacqueline de Jong, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2019); and Jacqueline de Jong, Les Abattoirs, Toulouse (2018/19). Recent group exhibitions featuring her work have taken place at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2024); the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (2024); and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2022/23). Her work is part of numerous international collections, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen; the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem; the Elie Khouri Art Foundation, Dubai; the Kunstmuseum Göteborg; the Lenbachhaus, Munich; and the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris.
