The challenge when writing about Peter Schjeldahl, who died of lung cancer this past October at the age of 80, having served as the New Yorker art critic for 24 years, is to produce something other than a collage of quotations. There they are, vivifying every review, singing an endless encore. Richter’s blurry abstractions have an “audible buzz.” Arbus’s photographs resemble the “gaping barrels of loaded guns.” Louise Lawler’s increase the “pitch of arbitrariness to something like a shriek.” A Gauguin teems with “jangling and caressing surprises,” and a too-earnest Met exhibition casts Goya as an “Iberian Henry Fonda.” I should add that those took me about two minutes to find—all I had to do was open my copies of Schjeldahl’s collected works to five random pages, and type.
Even in December 2019, when he announced his disease in a long, devil-may-care New Yorker essay, he did it with a dynamite lede: “Lung cancer, rampant. No surprise.” The diagnosis wasn’t the only startling thing about these sentences: Schjeldahl was writing about his personal life for once, and doing so in the same chiseled prose in which he described Giacometti’s bronzes and Manet’s oils. No matter what his subject happened to be, he treated it as an invitation to write beautifully.
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Schjeldahl was born in 1942 and grew up in North Dakota and Minnesota. He dropped out of college, and it shows: he had an autodidact’s distaste for teacher’s pets (in the Goya review quoted above, he says the exhibition “was conceived on the Planet of the Scholars, where every question is considered except ‘So what?’”). Poetry was his first literary love. As a young New Yorker, he wrote pithy, Frank O’Hara-esque verse and (also like O’Hara) tried his hand at criticism mainly to support his verse-writing. By the late ’70s, however, he was a critic first and foremost, writing short pieces for the Times and lengthy, magisterial ones for Art in America. An article on Munch, published in the May/June 1979 issue of this magazine, has the usual Schjeldahl quotability but more room for history and biography; he proceeds at a pace of calm insistence, quite different from the warp speed he’d adopt for the Village Voice and, later, the New Yorker.
There were fewer long pieces after the ’80s, in part because he learned to compress mounds of thought into a few paragraphs. Schjeldahl’s best stuff, to borrow something he said about Clement Greenberg, is always “in command of what it omits.” One conspicuous omission is any kind of overarching theory: he was more interested in how art complicates one-size-fits-all approximations (in this way, his foil might be Susan Sontag, whose dour generalizing on photography he called “an exercise in aesthetic insensibility”). Well after he gave up poetry, he stuffed his criticism with rich, metaphorical description that made most critics’ close reading seem plodding—the figures in El Greco’s paintings, he wrote in 2003, form a “slow-motion celestial tornado.” Schjeldahl was at his best when being lovingly negative; he never forgot to pay his subjects the compliment of vividness—Rubens’s nudes, e.g., have the “erotic appeal of a mud slide—so that even his jabs feel like jovial slaps on the back.”
Did he ever pine for his first love? On one hand, it’s hard to imagine someone so brilliant at one kind of writing wanting to practice another. But take a look at his 1976–77 poem, “Dear Profession of Art Writing”: he begins by wondering, a little bitterly, where he’d be without his day job (“Would I be more of a poet than I’ve become?”), then turns his frustration back on himself (“I must be a jerk not to regard you more highly, / Profession of Art Writing”), and arrives at a grudging respect (“I will not regret our years together”). Journalism is overflowing with talented people who know better but consider themselves failures because they’re not writing Real Literature. What’s special about Schjeldahl isn’t that he was immune from this kind of selfdoubt but that he felt it so intensely and carried on anyway. If he was especially strong when wrestling with an artist he both admired and loathed (“Francis Bacon has long been my least favorite great painter of the twentieth century”), perhaps it’s because he had plenty of practice wrestling with art criticism itself, eventually arriving at a gruff, good humored affection at least as deep as love at first sight.
Source: artnews.com