Peter Schjeldahl, Art Critic for The New Yorker, Dead at 80
Peter Schjeldahl.Peter Schjeldahl, an art critic for The New Yorker since 1998, is dead at age 80. Schjeldahl’s cause of death has not been confirmed. He was diagnosed with lung cancer at age 77, a fact that he wrote about in the 2019 essay “The Art of Dying.” The New Yorker shared the story on social media, confirming his death. Schjeldahl grew up in Minnesota, the son of a father who owned a series of businesses and a mother who was, in his words, a “prairie princess.” He began his writing career working for the Jersey Journal as a reporter. Schjeldahl was a poet earlier in life, though he stopped around 1990 “because I didn’t know what a poem was any longer.”
Schjeldahl began writing criticism in 1965. “I think academics who write about things write for people who have to read them, and who, if they show any style or elan in their writing, the readers will just resent it,” Schjeldahl said in 2004 about the style of his criticism. “If people don’t want to read me, I starve — there are no rewards in being obscure or obtuse or overbearing for me. I don’t think it’s because I have a naturally good character, but writing things that people want to read is my bread and butter.”
“Saddened beyond words by the passing of Peter Schjeldahl, whom I looked up to with astonishment, for the power of his observations, the vitality of his writing, and the ever-youthfulness of his enthusiasm; he was also the most invigorating of colleagues, stopping by my desk and in a couple of quick, incisive sentences, setting off a veritable pinball machine of surprising and far-reaching ideas,” said New Yorker film critic Richard Brody of his former colleague on Twitter. “Also, big Mets fan, as we long commiserated.” Below, more find tributes Schjeldahl from the art world and beyond.
Sorry to report that my dear friend Peter Schjeldahl —the poet, genius art critic and Mets savant —died this afternoon, at age 80. May he rest in peace and poetry. 🌿 pic.twitter.com/jdFS7L7OtW
— Deborah Solomon (@deborahsolo) October 21, 2022Sad news @newyorker. Its longtime art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, has died. Here's his 2019 essay on dying. https://t.co/8onIWsV0se
— Michael Luo (@michaelluo) October 21, 2022I never knew anyone who was so consistently alert to, and thrilled by, big ideas and the surprises of new perspectives. To go through a gallery or museum with him was to see with the unjaded eyes of an incredibly learned child. The brilliant Peter Schjeldahl has died. pic.twitter.com/FeELPJVCJn
— Ben Brantley (@BenjBrantley) October 21, 2022Alas, alas, the great Peter Schjeldahl has died. His final published thoughts, on Wolfgang Tillmans, could equally well have applied to his own work: pic.twitter.com/dQpsXlVxsS
— tad friend (@tadfriend) October 21, 2022"To judge a work of art involves self-surrender. You are something other than your own person when in art’s spell." Peter Schjeldahl. One of the great critics. RIP.
— Jason Zinoman (@zinoman) October 21, 2022Related
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