Interview with Jacqueline de Jong

Jacqueline de Jong’s life reads like a novel: with a wealth of professional credentials (as assistant to the famous museum director Willem Sandberg, as one of the rare women with the Situationist International, as editor and then editor-in-chief of several art magazines), she travelled from one European capital to the next, coming into contact with avant-garde movements (New Realism, Narrative Figuration, European Pop Art and early performance art, among others) without ever really melding with them, drawing from different cultures without ever allowing their influence to diminish the unique tenor of her own work.

With her inimitable brand of humour and outspokenness, Jacqueline de Jong tells us how she discovered acrylic paint, how she turned potatoes into works of art and how she made painting three-dimensional… Prepare yourself! Jacqueline’s journey is full of surprises, for it is nothing less than the journey of art through the second half of the twentieth century.

This interview with Jacqueline de Jong was conducted and edited by Gallien Déjean during the winter of 2019 and spring of 2020. It was published after Jacqueline de Jong received the AWARE 2019 Outstanding Merit Award organised by AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, co-founded and directed by Camille Morineau. The award is designed to draw much-needed attention to important women artists whose work and careers are too often overlooked, or which garner late recognition in limited retrospectives.

Jacqueline de Jong received the AWARE 2019 Outstanding Merit Prize, organised by AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, co-founded and directed by Camille Morineau. This Prize symbolises the much-needed recognition of these major women artists whose work and careers have all too often been either overlooked or rediscovered in the framework of partial retrospectives.