Peter Schjeldahl, one of the most read art critics in the United States thanks to his vivacious style and sharp intellect, passed away at the age of 80.
He had been battling lung cancer, and in a poignant 2019 piece titled “The Art of Dying,” which was published in the New Yorker, the magazine for which he had been the head art critic since 1998, he detailed his struggle with the condition.
The New Yorker tweeted on Friday night to report Schjeldahl’s passing.
For the past 50 years, Schjeldahl has made it a point to speak at the most significant performances in New York as well as occasionally those outside of the city. Reading his review, one could tell which performances in a scene overrun by retrospectives really mattered.
Schjeldahl’s writing is appealing in large part due to its style. Since Schjeldahl began his career as a poet, his writing has a distinctive tone from that of the majority of other art commentators. Even when discussing conceptual art, he frequently removed art terminology from his assessments to make them more readable by a wider audience.
His writing was thick and buttery, full of large words that belonged in novels rather than art reviews. His reviews have a pleasant, lyrical tone when read aloud. They can also be fascinating and even funny when read aloud.
“Criticism joins poetry, for me, in having a civic duty to limber up the common word stock, keeping good words in play,” he told critic Deborah Solomon in a 2008 Artforum interview. “My sidekick is the Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary.“
It’s the kind of writing that can be endlessly quoted and is full of one-liners. For instance, Schjeldahl said the following about Jeff Koons: “Jeff Koons makes me nauseous. I’m the most sickened by the possibility that he is the sole artist of this generation. “I feel in good hands with Sigmar Polke, which is unusual, considering the man is a nut,” he said in the opening of a review of a Sigmar Polke performance.
