Postwar Culture

Jacqueline de Jong was born in 1939 in the town of Hengelo, in the eastern Netherlands. Her Jewish family narrowly avoided deportation and spent the war in Switzerland; after the armistice, they settled in Amsterdam. As a young woman, de Jong studied French and drama in Paris and London, art history in Amsterdam, and worked for several years in the department of applied arts at the Stedelijk Museum. During a visit to London in 1959, she encountered the Danish painter and sculptor Asger Jorn (b. 1914), founder of the CoBrA group. She had already met certain Dutch members of the Situationist International, including Constant Nieuwenhuys, Armando, and the architect Har Oudejans, while working at the Stedelijk, and through Jorn she befriended members of Gruppe SPUR, the German section of the Situationist International, an international organization of avant-garde artists, architects, and intellectuals active between 1957 and 1972 and headed by Guy Debord. De Jong officially joined the Situationists in 1960 and for the next few years she participated in the group’s conferences and served on the central committee. The dynamics among the Situationists were often tendentious, and in 1962 the members of Gruppe SPUR were controversially expelled by Debord. As the split deepened between members who aligned themselves ideologically with Debord and those who would eventually break off to establish the Second Situationist International, de Jong remained largely neutral. Between 1962 and 1967, she created and edited The Situationist Times, an English-language publication that featured such diverse contributors as Gaston Bachelard, Roberto Matta, Wilfredo Lam, and Jacques Prévert. De Jong participated in the student uprising in Paris in May 1968, designing and distributing vibrant revolutionary posters. She ended her ten-year relationship with Jorn in 1970 and returned to Amsterdam, where she continued to produce large action paintings. Her paintings have been exhibited throughout Europe, and she has amassed a substantial archive documenting her time involved with the Situationist International, The Situationist Times, and Asger Jorn.