New Yorker<\/em>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nPeter Schjeldahl, the New Yorker<\/em>‘s art critic and a half-century-long prose stylist of New York City’s art scene, died today, October 21 at the age of 80.<\/p>\nAlthough Schjeldahl’s cause of death has not been officially confirmed, he was diagnosed with lung cancer at 77. In his fragmentary, freewheeling essay \u201cThe Art of Dying,\u201d published in the New Yorker<\/em> in 2019, Schjeldahl recounted how he was once awarded a Guggenheim grant to write a memoir but never completed the task. \u201cI don’t feel interesting,\u201d he said simply. \u201cThe Art of Dying\u201d was an attempt to remedy this failure, recounting his beginnings in criticism in 1965, his entanglement with the St. Mark’s Church and Lower East Side poetry scene of the 1960s and ’70s, his sexual relationships, his drug use and alcoholism, and his ever-evolving relationship with dying and death. Citing \u201cthe grim reaper\u201d as his muse, \u201dhe likened himself to\u201c a camera situated nowhere and taking in every last detail of the pulsating world. \u201d<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\nBorn in Fargo, North Dakota in 1942, Schjeldahl grew up in Minnesota, where he studied English at Carleton College but did not finish his degree. He began his career at the Jersey Journal<\/em> in Jersey City after cold writing to \u201cpapers in small cities near big ones.\u201d Following a brief stint writing for Art News, Schjeldahl worked as an art critic at the Village Voice<\/em> before joining the New Yorker<\/em> as a staff writer in 1998. <\/p>\n\n
Peter Schjeldahl photographed by Gil Roth in 2021 for the Virtual Memories Show (courtesy of Gil Roth and the Virtual Memories Show \u00a9 2021)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\nWith little formal training in art history or practice, Schjeldahl dove into art criticism simply from a passion for art, developed in part while abroad in Paris in the early 1960s. \u201cMost of what I know in a scholarly way about art I learned on deadlines,\u201d he later wrote, \u201cto sound as if I knew what I was talking about \u2014 as, little by little, I did.\u201d<\/p>\n
Over his long career, Schjeldahl championed living artists working across a variety of genres and subject material, including Faith Ringgold, Richard Serra, Amy Sherald, Bruce Nauman, and countless others, while turning a critical eye to others, like C\u00e9zanne and KAWS. Schjeldahl kept writing essays and reviews until his final days, including a panegyric on Wolfgang Tillmans’ show at the Museum of Modern Art published just two weeks before his death.<\/p>\n
Schjeldahl also wrote poetry before art criticism eventually overtook his poetic practice. In his brief time at Carleton, he co-founded a poetry journal that was an exponent of the then-contemporary New York School. In 1978, he published a collection entitled Since 1964: New and Selected Poems<\/em>drawing from several volumes of his work.<\/p>\n\n\n