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Jacqueline de Jong, Rediscovered Avant-Garde Artist, Dies at 85

Jacqueline de Jong, a Dutch artist who was at the forefront of a 1960s avant-garde movement that critiqued postwar capitalism, and who enjoyed a career resurgence in her last decade, died on June 29 in Amsterdam. She was 85.

Her brother, Philip de Jong, said her death, in a hospital, was caused by liver cancer.

Ms. de Jong was associated with the so-called Situationist International movement, which combined elements of Dada, Surrealism and Marxism in its condemnation of capitalism. She founded and edited The Situationist Times, a multidisciplinary journal, published from 1962 to 1967, that included essays, artwork and groundbreaking graphic design.

For many years she was associated and romantically involved with Asger Jorn, a Danish painter and writer who was 25 years her senior and married.

But her artistic career was entirely independent of him, and, in spite of scant recognition over a long period, she continued to explore her unique artistic style for the rest of her life. She never settled on a single style, but bounced among Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and New Figuration, a movement that rejected abstraction.

“La Vie Privée des Cosmonautes ‘le Cosmonaute Invisible’” (1966). Ms de Jong’s experimental work drew on Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and other influences.Credit…Jacqueline de Jong, via Pippy Houldsworth Gallery

Ms. de Jong had lived and worked in Amsterdam since the 1970s, and since the 1990s had kept a country house and studio in Bouan, in southwestern France. She was a painter, sculptor and engraver who also worked in unconventional media. One recent series of works was inspired by sprouting potatoes she found in her cellar in France; she depicted them in paintings and also made them into objects d’art and jewelry, coating them in 18-carat gold.

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