IN THE AUTUMN OF 2019, art critic Peter Schjeldahl learned that lung cancer had whittled all but about six months between him and oblivion. (Immunotherapy promised nothing but gave him three years. He died in October 2022 at the age of eighty.) Attention, as performed by Schjeldahl, had always been a live art form, his reviews not merely assessments of prowess or value but near-rhapsodic accounts of his experiences of art, of looking. Perhaps this is how, and why, he chose to see the hourglass as half full. As he told his friend, writer-curator Jarrett Earnest: “I want to do everything I would do anyway, with more appreciation.” And so, despite his diagnosis, the critic got back to work.
The Art of Dying: Writings 2019–2022 gathers the forty-six pieces Schjeldahl wrote for the New Yorker in the wake of his death sentence. Throughout, mortality doesn’t loom so much as it acts as his Virgil, leading him through the world now unfolding and receding before his eyes. In the earliest pages of the collection, Schjeldahl confesses that he was once given a Guggenheim grant to write a memoir but never got around to finishing it. “I don’t feel interesting,” he explains. “I don’t trust my memories (or anyone’s memories) as reliable records of anything—and I have a fear of lying.” While criticism is not memoir, it is a record of a mind in a moment in time. Following four terrific collections of Schjeldahl’s writings that were published over his lifetime—including The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings of Peter Schjeldahl 1978–1990; The 7 Days Art Columns 1988–1990; Let’s See: Writings on Art from The New Yorker (a selection of pieces from 1998 to 2008); and Hot Cold Heavy Light, 100 Art Writings 1988–2018—The Art of Dying might be read as the final volume of an autobiography refracted across that strange profession, art criticism, but also as an exquisite, aching ode “to the flow of sensation and reflection that constitutes a life in art.”
Criticism is rarely, if ever, taught in schools, its practitioners largely stumbling sideways into it from some other literary ambition. Schjeldahl wanted to be a poet, but a paycheck was a paycheck, no matter how measly. As he later mused: “I thought it was normal for poets to write art criticism.” When he arrived in New York in 1962 at the age of twenty, his hero, John Ashbery, had long been publishing reviews in Art News alongside Barbara Guest and James Schuyler, who was also a contributing editor. Frank O’Hara—one of Schjeldahl’s most cherished idols—wrote his much-lauded Lunch Poems (1964) while working at the Museum of Modern Art. (Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me, written by Schjeldahl’s daughter Ada Calhoun, tenderly chronicles the afterlife of Schjeldahl’s unfinished biography of the great New York Schooler.)
By 1965, Schjeldahl was wringing his nickels writing single-sentence reviews for Art News; the following year he was hired (and fired) by the Village Voice. (It would be the first of his three stints at the weekly.) Meanwhile, he immersed himself in the downtown scene, making quite a name for himself. His work was included in the compendium The Young American Poets: A Big Table Book (1966) alongside Louise Glück, Ted Berrigan, Bill Berkson, and others. Voice dance critic Jill Johnston caught him in the act during an afternoon program organized by the Language poet Hannah Weiner that same year. As Johnston recalled:
I asked Hannah Weiner how her twenty-one poets qualified as poets. She said she just knew them as poets who also did things. But Peter Schjeldahl, I asked, did he ever do anything? No he didn’t. At Longview’s, Peter’s two-minute event featured himself shaving while several friends shot at him with cap pistols. Beautiful poem. I’m serious.
It’s form’s job to organize a mind, sort out what thoughts go where and the ways in which they should be expressed. But minds are feral, and writing can be a wild ride. Schjeldahl continued to compose poems while contributing reviews—to the New York Times, Art News, Art International, Art in America, and elsewhere—but he didn’t always keep the two in their respective lanes. In “Great Poet,” a prose poem from his 1973 collection Dreams, he conjures a scene in which poet Ron Padgett asks whether his latest work is any good. Schjeldahl responds with his characteristic enthusiasm, a critic even in reverie:
The poem is not only good, it’s incredible! It is hilarious and at the same time very moving and full of profundity. I note passages whose brilliance and grandeur remind me of “The Wasteland” and “The Duino Elegies.” I read it aloud, finally, laughing and weeping with joy and admiration.
In the late ’70s, Schjeldahl gave up poetry. “Or poetry gave up on me,” as he laments in “The Art of Dying,” the collection’s opening essay as well as its bellwether, “because I didn’t know what a poem was any longer and had severed or sabotaged all my connections to the poetry world.” His devotees might argue that column inches became his constraint. Like a poet, he deployed language for its motley rhythms and precise potencies and rarely wrote at great length. David Remnick, the New Yorker’s editor in chief, would remember Schjeldahl as “more a sprinter than a miler” when it came to word count, but that kind of accounting doesn’t take the measure of his sentences, which, by the critic’s own demand and design, contained at least one idea each. (No small feat, ask any writer.) Up against his stately, brutish elders (Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg), certain of his powerful predecessors (Time magazine’s Robert Hughes and the New Republic’s Hilton Kramer), and his Ivy-beleaguered peerage (the October School), Schjeldahl ranked dead last in advancing aesthetic theories, pummeling political agendas, and general hauteur. Where he smoked them all was in pure literary prowess.
Initially published in the New Yorker under the title “77 Sunset Me” on December 23, 2019, “The Art of Dying” was written in the weeks following Schjeldahl’s terminal diagnosis. A lifelong writher under deadline, he crowed to his readers that the piece had poured out of him, “my muse being, I guess, the grim reaper.” If, for fifty years, the critic wrote about the products of other minds, this time he turned his pen on himself. Possessed of a bracing candor, full of feeling yet utterly free of sap, the essay is a bona fide tour de force that should by all rights be framed and hung in the critic’s beloved Frick Collection alongside Rembrandt’s self-portrait of 1658, which Schjeldahl once estimated to be “the best painting in the museum if not the world.”
Schjeldahl begins with a nod to his end. “Lung cancer. Rampant. No surprise,” he tells the reader from point-blank range. Thereafter, his memories tumble before us like glittering shards in a kaleidoscope. He shares choice details of his growing up in Minnesota, “a kid crazy about language and an omnivorous reader” and the oldest of five children. He recounts his youthful debaucheries, a rough bout with depression, and his long game with alcoholism. He alludes to the love affairs that sent him reeling until, in a near-whiffed stroke of luck, he met actress Brooke Alderson, his wife and coconspirator of almost fifty years. “Meeting Brooke, having Ada, and getting sober are my life’s top three red-letter days.” His gratitude outweighs his melancholy. He regrets nothing, not even smoking, and admits, without the slightest sting of guilt, to having relished every hour he spent away from his family, in the company of “my lifelong lover: you, reader.” If this courtliness from Schjeldahl was familiar—his grand erudition was always warm, made friendlier via the magic of a Midwestern gee whiz-ardry—his admission of intimacy was new.
In early 2020, he picked up his New Yorker column again, only to decamp with Alderson to his home in the Catskills when COVID-19 descended weeks later. As other art critics scrabbled for what to cover and how, Schjeldahl wrote “Out of Time,” published on April 13, 2020. Certain of his own fate, he now faced the uncertain fate of the world, trying to find value, or at least the comfort of precedent, in what may come. “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?” he asks, then answers: “I think the reason is a routine consciousness of mortality.” Like any great artist, Schjeldahl deploys light and shadow to give his subject depth, dimension. He tells the reader about the trip he took to the Prado in Madrid that December to visit Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, “the best painting by the best of all painters.” (Don’t tell Rembrandt.) There, he stood in front of the work for the better part of two days, not just for a last look—too indolent, too self-indulgent, one assumes, by his standards of engagement—but to crack open its mysterious composition once and for all. He does so, much to his own delight, then explains that, this many months later, what he now apprehends in that painting is grief. “This sort of reevaluation can happen when events disrupt your life’s habitual ways and means,” he explains. “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.”
Although his reviews were, as ever, propelled by a radiant intellect and a seemingly unflagging enthusiasm for art and artists, Schjeldahl’s eye seemed to refresh itself, his platinum connoisseurship at once invigorated and challenged. “Diego [Rivera] keeps looking better in retrospect,” he writes, adding, “I prefer [Frida] Kahlo myself, though by a narrower margin now.” He recants his distaste for Andy Goldsworthy’s Storm King Wall, which he blames on his prior exhaustion with “back-to-the-land schmaltz,” and concedes that he was slow to warm to Philip Guston’s move to figuration from abstraction, though those are the paintings of his that have “outlasted, in authenticity and quality, that of every other American painter since.” Which isn’t to say that Schjeldahl went completely starry-eyed. He doesn’t take to the pulped Pop of KAWS, and, to the horror of some, finally comes clean about his deep-rooted dislike of Paul Cézanne. Artworks don’t change, but contexts do, minds do, as Schjeldahl well knew. In what would be his last art review—on Wolfgang Tillmans’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art—he makes room for the inevitable shifting of tides. “The man is a genius,” he declares, all but off-gassing euphoria, at one point comparing the photographer to Einstein. Later, the critic briefly pauses his swooning to wonder whether Tillmans will continue to make such works in the future. His verdict: “That’s to be seen.”
Jennifer Krasinski is a writer, critic, and frequent contributor to 4Columns and Bookforum.