ART CITIES:Amsterdam-Jacqueline de Jong

Jacqueline de Jong was involved in European Avant-Garde networks in the 1960s, including the Gruppe SPUR and the politically engaged Situationist International Movement. By now her publishing, painting and sculpture endeavours have spanned over five decades, in which motifs of eroticism, desire, violence and humour continue to recur. In her painterly practice she has effortlessly switched between different styles: from expressionist painting to new figuration and pop art.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Stedelijk Museum Archive

The large exhibition “Pinball Wizard-The Work and Life of Jacqueline de Jong” presents the multi-faceted oeuvre created by the artist since the 1960’s, in which she switches effortlessly between various styles such as Abstract Expressionism, New Viguration and Pop Art. Her work also ranges in scale, from small diptychs that chronicle a day in the life of the artist, to monumental canvases dominated by an absurd and often violent and erotic world. Jacqueline de Jong was born in 1939, in the Dutch town of Hengelo, to liberal, contemporary art-collecting Jewish industrialists. In 1942, she and her mother fled to her mother’s native Switzerland, where they stayed out the war in Zurich; one of the artist’s earliest memories is being given chocolate by Salvation Army volunteers. When they returned to Amsterdam in 1946, De Jong had to learn to speak Dutch again. De Jong’s career has been characterized by border crossings – physically, ideologically and aesthetically. When Stedelijk Museum.’s director Willem Sandberg appoints Jacqueline de Jong as an assistant in the applied art department (1958-60), it signals the beginning of an extraordinary relationship between the artist and the Stedelijk. It not only deepens her admiration of the Museum’s Dollection but, as an artist with no formal art education, serves as a training ground for her own work. In light of which, the current exhibition (which presents her work in the company of artwork from the Collection) is even more extraordinary. Like a true “Pinball Wizard”, the artist moves through the collection of the Stedelijk, placing her work alongside that of artists who are her inspiration and influence such as Vieira da Silva, Chaim Soutine, Jean Dubuffet, R.B. Kitai, Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky. The result is a fusion of masterpieces by De Jong and previously unseen works, juxtaposed with key artworks from the holdings of the Stedelijk, supplemented by the artist’s drawings, artist’s books, designs and archival material. Jacqueline de Jong operated within avant-garde networks in and outside of Europe in a quite unique fashion. Although not trained as an artist, De Jong had always painted; she moved to Paris and, throughout the 1960s, made Art Brut- and CoBrA-inflected contortions of color and animalistic form. In 1959 Jacqueline de Jong became involved with Danish artist Asger Jorn. Through him she met the Gruppe Spur, the German section of the Internationale Situationniste. She met Guy Debord in 1960 in Amsterdam, the same year she joined the Situationist International and started to participate in conferences and the Central committee. Expelled from the Situationist International by its de facto leader, Guy Debord, in 1962. The nub of the dispute was de Jong’s support for her fellow artists in Munich’s Gruppe SPUR, the erstwhile German branch of the Situationist International, in defiance of Guy Debord’s increasingly stringent anti-aestheticism. De Jong responded by producing “The Situationist Times”, an experimental journal whose visual and verbal dérive (through essays, artworks and images) hewed to situationist principals while rejecting their increasingly totalitarian application. Six issues were printed between 1962 and 1967. De Jong marched with the Parisian students in 1968, printing posters in support of the movement at her studio in the 11th arrondissement. In the early 1970s, she moved back to Amsterdam, where she has lived ever since. She also initiated and organised Happenings with Jean-Jacques Lebel, and other events and exhibitions. De Jong has worked in the Netherlands and France since 1971. Throughout the years, the work of Jacqueline de Jong has always been collected and followed but over recent decades, and particularly after the purchase of the De Jong archive by the Yale University Beinecke Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts in 2012, her work has gleaned considerable international attention. Recently, this materialised in exhibitions at venues in New York, Malmö, Toulouse and Paris, and in publications and acquisitions although, until now, her work has received little attention in the Netherlands

Info: Curator:  Margriet Schavemaker, Stedelijk Museum, Museumplein 10, Amsterdam, Duration: 9/2-18/8/19, Days & Hours: Mon-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, Fri 10:00-22:00, www.stedelijk.nl