Peter Schjeladahl, a New Yorker staff art critic whose elegant perspectives of the New York art world has been a reliable guiding light for decades, passed away this Friday (21st October) in Bovina, New York. Schjeldahl died of lung cancer, which he had been diagnosed with in 2019.
So, today we try to look back at who Schjeldahl was and how he became a reliable figure in the art world of New York.
Born on 20th March 1942, in Fargo, North Dakota, he was raised in both North Dakota and Minnesota. After dropping out after his sophomore year, he began sending letters to find a writing job. The only one that wrote back then was The Jersey Journal, based out of Jersey City, New Jersey. They offered him a job, and that is when he began immersing himself in New York’s poetry community.
He did return to Carleton College, from where he had dropped out earlier, only to drop out again, after he and a classmate founded a poetry magazine titled Mother. It showcases the poets of the New York community, with whom Schjeldahl was very familiar.
His writing life really began with poetry, and the sensibilities of a poet never left his work. “I thought it was normal for poets to write art criticism,” he told Interview in 2014. “So I started doing that, and people liked what I did.”
When hearing the news of Schjeldahl’s death, David Remnick, the New Yorker’s editor-in-chief, wrote that “a voice is what he always had: distinct, clear, funny. A poet’s voice—epigrammatic, nothing wasted.” He added, “Peter was a man of well-developed opinions, on art and much else. He was someone who, after being lost for a time, knew some things about survival.”
Schjeldahl’s criticism was amplified with a sense of devotion to finding truth and humanity in art, never succumbing to trending terms or what might be called “artspeak”, the critic instead prized the personal, using his charm and humor to bring big ideas down to a human scale. As a true critic, he sought to discover questions in the work, rather than pretend to be holding all the cards. Rather than talking about the grand implications of the art in front of him, he chose to write instead of his understanding, which led to the birth of meaning-making as a way to share one’s criticism.
Writer Jarrett Earnest, in the introduction to Schjeldahl’s collection of art writing Hot, Cold, Heavy Light (2019), wrote that the critic “attends closely to the often contradictory ideas, emotions and associations that arise when we look at art, thereby clearing away any pre-existing opinions, and stays responsive to the specificity of each encounter.”
He spent a year in Paris, where he discovered his love for art, and returned to the US in 1965, he joined Art News as a staff critic. Then, he moved on to Village Voice, lasting from 1991 to 1998. In 1995, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to write a memoir, while we opted to instead use the money to buy a tractor. Finally, he took on the of a staff critic at The New Yorker, a role he maintained and added a great bit of substance to until his death.
New writing of his appeared in the magazine as recently as this month.
“Why does the art of what we term the Old Masters have so much more soulful heft than that of most moderns and nearly all of our contemporaries?” Schjeldahl wrote in an April 2020 essay for the New Yorker, that linked the Covid-19 pandemic to the work of the Old Masters. “I think the reason is a routine consciousness of mortality.” In the essay, he wrote that “This sort of reevaluation can happen when events disrupt your life’s habitual ways and means. You may be taken not only out of yourself—the boon of successful work in every art form when you’re in the mood for it—but out of your time, relocated to a particular past that seems to dispel, in a flash of undeniable reality, everything that you thought you knew. It’s not like going back to anything. It’s like finding yourself anticipated as an incidental upshot of fully realized, unchanging truths.”