Peter Schjeldahl, the New Yorker’s art critic for 24 years until his death in October 2022, had an interesting side gig. A man of fearsome verbal powers and formidable critical intelligence, he volunteered each fall to judge scarecrows on Farm Day in Bovina, the rustically named Catskill village where he maintained a second home. We don’t know much about the criteria he applied, but Schjeldahl’s daughter, Ada Calhoun, reports that he had one question as he assessed the various entries: “What does hay want to be?” Once a critic, always a critic.
Schjeldahl took that truism literally. When he was told he had lung cancer in 2019, all he wanted to know was how long he could keep on writing. He had, he said, a deadline on Tuesday. Given six months, he eked out three more years with the help of immunotherapy and his own brand of grit. The Art of Dying is the harvest of that grace period, 46 pieces on an impressive range of subjects, from Bronzino, portraitist of the Medici, to the contemporary German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans (the last essay he published). Schjeldahl’s last final years overlapped with the pandemic, which did the unthinkable to an art critic by closing the museums. As a result, the volume also includes, apart from exhibition reviews, his preferred genre, sundry essays about books and more general topics (“Mortality in the OId Masters”). But what’s perhaps most startling about The Art of Dying is that there’s so little here that seems final. There’s no self-pity here, no parting words, no wistful look back at a long career. The book just ends, as life does.
Schjeldahl’s scarecrow-judging and other unexpected details can be gleaned from Calhoun’s recent tribute to her father, Also a Poet, which, while not aspiring to be a biography, still somehow manages to become one. Setting out to finish what her father couldn’t, a biography of the New York poet Frank O’Hara, Calhoun also fails at that same task. As she encounters the obstacles her dad did — notably O’Hara’s recalcitrant sister — we learn much about Schjeldahl himself, from his spotty parenting skills to his obsession with fireworks. (For many years, he hosted an enormous annual July 4th party in Bovina, to which everyone who’d heard about it was invited and which remained, in his own words, “strictly illegal until the end.”)
Calhoun reminds us that Schjeldahl started out as a poet, the author of several volumes of verse ranging in tone from surrealist fantasy to O’Hara-inspired street banter. Art criticism, for Schjeldahl, began as a side hustle, though, as he claimed then, a time- and soul-consuming one. I picked up his Since 1964: New and Selected Poems and came across “Dear Profession of Art Writing” (1976-77), as funny a putdown of that activity as one can imagine. Dismissing art writing as his “crummy benefactor,” Schjeldahl, a college drop-out from the Midwest, also questions his own qualifications and personal suitability for the job: “Abysmal ignorance, slovenly habits of thought, star-struck / narcissism.” Yet as he recounts how hard he works at his task — how he spends his nights typing and re-typing his reviews, leavening them with jokes, “making the paragraphs shapely, the transitions neat,” how he sweats over each “inapt / or impolitic phrase,” groans at unwanted editorial meddling and then feels the inevitable “taste of ashes” in his mouth when the piece appears and is promptly forgotten, “like spit on a griddle, unremarked”— one gradually realizes how deeply Schjeldahl cares about his criticism, how superior Schjeldahl the art reviewer is to his competitors, those better-trained, better-credentialed “footnote critics.” If for the true artist no daub of paint is accidental, every word in a Schjeldahl review is, once he is finally done, in the right place.
Schjeldahl, for the benefit of his devoted audience, demystified both art and writing about art. “Each of us,” he commented in 2004, after visiting a Vermeer exhibit, “is born with a capacity to see and feel intensely and with precision.” Ever the provocateur, Schjeldahl claimed that paintings, viewed strictly as objects, were little more than “pieces of cloth dirtied by self-appointed individuals acting on some strange, burning motive of pleasure,” and therefore without any relation to an out-of-control art market attaching insane values to them. And yet, how desirable they were! Being an art critic meant, he joked, “loving things that didn’t belong to me and talking about them to people they didn’t belong to, either” (“An Auction at Christie’s,” 1989). Putting in words what many among us may have imagined while wandering around an art exhibit, Schjeldahl often wished he could just snatch some of the artworks on display. “Take-me-home covetable” is his verdict, in The Art of Dying, about a still-life by Dike Blair he has just seen at an art fair. And “I want one,” he decides after inspecting the woodcuts of the Norwegian artist Nikolai Astrup at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. (In the same essay, he states about Norway, from where the Schjeldahls originally came, that he liked the country just fine and had in fact been there, watching the sun “start to set and then think better of it,” but also knew that feeling didn’t distinguish him from “any gadabout New Yorker.”)
Schjeldahl’s was art criticism at its most pleasingly demotic, written by someone who saw the same things everyone else did, only a little more clearly, who thought the same thoughts everyone else did, only a little more clearly. Not that he always seemed to be trying too hard to communicate them. Careless turns of phrase — of the kind regularly flagged by college writing teachers — occur in every Schjeldahl piece. For example, he’d think nothing of calling a painter “very, very good” or using “whoop-de-do ” in a review. Or he’d point out that, viewed up close, the faces of notables depicted by Hans Holbein “go bang.” And then there were, of course, those wild analogies, Schjeldahl’s trademark. He was proud of them. Like wildflowers in a field, they crop up everywhere, lingering in the mind even after the rest of the review is forgotten. Velázquez was “Mr. Cool,” he informed his readers on the occasion of a 1989 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, “If he were a rock singer, he would be Roy Orbison.” When he really felt like flexing his rhetorical muscles, Schjeldahl could extend an analogy to exquisitely damning effect, as in this review of a Raphael show in 2004 at London’s National Gallery: “Raphael added sugar to Leonardo’s recipes.” With this putdown, Schjeldahl, who thought Raphael’s art was a simpering softening of Renaissance greatness, managed to accuse the painter both of wanting to please too much and of being entirely unoriginal.
Similar gems also grace The Art of Dying. In what might be the best essay in Schjeldahl’s oeuvre, “Goya and the Art of Survival,” he calls Goya, that most inscrutable of artists, a courtier intimately familiar with the depths of hell, “a stormy petrel skimming waves of change that swamped others.” But Schjeldahl then immediately switches, as only he can, from tempest-tossed ocean to The Factory, the most notorious of urban art studios: Goya’s “nearest avatar,” he writes, “is Andy Warhol.” (The remark is even funnier when one considers that Warhol, pale skin, floppy wig, Ray-Bans and all, was himself impossible to pin down).
As The Art of Dying reminds us, one of the basic ingredients of a Schjeldahl review is the offhand remark or wisecrack, the folksy cousin of the epigram, intended to make you laugh even as it enlightens. “I tire of being made to feel smart rather than pleased,” Schjeldahl quips apropos the “strenuous looking” that a Cézanne painting requires of him, as if feeling smart wasn’t a desirable state of affairs. And he even cracks a joke about the gruesome putrefying corpse in Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Dead Christ in his Tomb, wondering what it would be if it were removed from its receptacle. Answer: “A sanitation problem.” Or take Schjeldahl’s observation about the photographer Tillmans: “His gayness is a given, not a battlefront” — a verbal shrug that clears the way for what Schjeldahl really wants to talk about, art, not sex. Since he’s emphatically not a “footnote critic,” Schjeldahl feels free to pass judgments that would make more cautious critics shudder and watchful editors wince, declaring Rembrandt’s self-portrait from 1658 the “best painting in the museum, if not the world,” an honor Schjeldahl had earlier, in another essay also included in The Art of Dying, accorded to Velázquez’s Las Meninas. And then there are those moments where words seem to fail him entirely. About Manet, he simply notes: “I love him.”
What does art want to be? A painting in a museum is a dead thing, made by someone who is, in most cases, also dead, a flat surface hung on a wall claiming to represent a person, a thing, a landscape, or an idea which, too, no longer exists in that very same form. The wonder of art is that whatever was dead comes alive again the moment we look at it, when, for example, an Edward Hopper painting takes our breath away and is “not giving it back.” Thus, all art — in another memorable Schjeldahl generalization, expressed in the new book’s title essay — is contemporary art, regardless of when it was made. Look at Rembrandt’s The Polish Rider at the Frick, which shows its subject at the moment of transformation, as he’s changing from a boy into a man: “His mouth, still boyishly soft, will have a harsher set by the end of the day.” What we see is a present moment that will soon be past, a young man who will soon not be young anymore. But we’ll walk away from that painting knowing that tomorrow, for another viewer, that man will be a boy again, that his past, and what is now our past, will again be someone else’s present. In Schjeldahl’s writing, the hopeful notion that art vanquishes death is saved from triviality by the insight that any such redemption is temporary, afforded a brief life only through the act of looking, which, however, can be repeated infinitely.
Rembrandt, De Poolse ruiter (The Polish Rider), 1655. Oil on canvas, 117 × 135 cm (45.9 × 53.1 in). The Frick Collection, New York. Source; Wikimedia Commons.
Schjeldahl is not interested in doing that looking for us, which is why he rarely dwells on a single artwork for too long. But when does, boy, can he describe! Here he is on one of the floating sheet pyramids made by Washington, D.C. artist Sam Gilliam: “Thick grounds in white or black are crazed with specks, splotches, and occasional dragged strokes of varied color.” But Schjeldahl is barely done with his description when he switches to what is more important to him, the way in which a viewer might experience Gilliam’s work: “While you feel the weight of the wooden supports, your gaze loses itself on something like starry skies: dizzying impressions of infinite distance in tension with the dense grounds.”
Looking at art in this way is as lonely an act as was the process of making it. In one of the most powerful passages in The Art of Dying, Schjeldahl pictures Franciso Goya, his work done, packing up his brushes and going home, “leaving his subjects alone, as he was alone, and he leaves us alone with them.” But there is a cure for such loneliness: “We look at paintings … as individuals, alone,” he wrote in 2021, in his essay in praise of the Frick collection. “We may then, with excitement or anxiety, turn to others in the hope of having our responses confirmed.” Make your lonely contemplation the topic of a communal conversation with your readers. This is as good a brief for art writing, and specifically for Schjeldahl’s art writing, as you’re likely to find.
If I had to offer an analogy for the Schjeldahl review (try to find an analogy for an analogy maker!), the closest that comes to mind would, indeed, be Frank O’Hara’s poetry. Granted, there are, in Schjeldahl’s essays, no time stamps of the kind O’Hara relished (“It’s 12:40 of / a Thursday”; “It is 12:20 in New York”), fewer zigzaggy detours (“I look / at bargains in wristwatches”), and there isn’t too much self-revelation. But we find in Schjeldahl’s work the same delight in dailyness, a similar embrace of the here and now, and a comparable “ranginess,” to use a favorite Schjeldahl word, as he skips, in the same review, from Goya to Warhol, from Bronzino to Alice Neel, the way O’Hara takes us from Verlaine to Billie Holiday. And if O’Hara (incidentally an art curator by profession) strolled along Broadway and Fifth Avenue as he made up his poems, Schjeldahl did his creative meandering indoors, in the galleries of the museums he roamed, notebook in hand. “Poet Peter,” as Schjeldahl refers to himself in the introductory essay that provides the collection’s title, and “Critic Peter” are not so far apart as he himself might have believed.
As in a Frank O’Hara poem, some less convincing, weaker passages seep through the capacious filter of Schjeldahl’s critical sensorium. There’s the occasional trite cliche, such as “Art has many mansions,” hardly saved by the qualification he adds: “Today, the most compelling tend to the tumbledown” (“The Medici as Artists Saw Them,” 2021). And there are metaphors he allows to go on for so long so that they end up being insincere: works by the Japanese photographer Eiko Yamazawa, Schjeldahl asserts, “didn’t so much blow my mind as take it away and replace it with a better one.” And attempts to display his political bona fides lead to intermittent swaths of turgid writing, as in his faint condemnation of the cartoonish KKK-like figures in Philip Guston’s later paintings, when he feels he must assure his readers that he knows artistic license is just a value maintained “by and for members of an elite so confident of virtue … as to be unconscious of existing as such.” Schjeldahl is at his best when he abandons academic box-checking and forms sentences in which meaning and sound fuse perfectly and transcripts of his personal experiences become paeans to an artwork’s anarchic power to mesmerize its viewer across a gap of centuries. Consider, for example, his comment on Velázquez’ extraordinary King Philip IV of Spain at the Frick: “Passages of visible brushwork snap into verisimilitude at a calculated distance.” Velázquez’s portrait, the way Schjeldahl perceives it, has its own continuing agency, still prescribing how it must be viewed (from, calculates Schjeldahl, thirteen feet away).
Schjeldahl knew, of course, that, having the leisure to make such observations, he was something of an elitist, too, an aesthete with a VIP pass — a fact all his attempts at dialogic chumminess can’t hide. When he recognizes, in the collection’s title essay, that dying is a rather ordinary thing, since everyone must do it, you can still feel the shock rippling through his lines. But not everyone dies the way Schjeldahl did, writing until the very end. In Also a Poet, Ada Calhoun reports her frustration with her father’s impassive demeanor when he received his diagnosis. But in truth Schjeldahl had long prepared himself for his grand finale. “Take death for a walk in your mind, folks.” Because that’s precisely what he had been practicing for decades, in any museum or gallery he entered, with any review he wrote, with any painting that his prose enlivened again. “Allow the hues and tones to surprise and absorb your gaze,” he once ordered his readers as he conjured two portraits by the Florentine Mannerist Jacopo Pontormo for them: “Look long at his works … You might as well swoon. Even Pontormo’s blacks and grays glow.” And today Schjeldahl is still taking death for a walk, in this book, where on every page he’s right next to us, asking us to look long and hard and not give up, whispering into our ears: “This is very, very good.”
[Published by Abrams Press on May 14, 2024, 284 pages, $$30.00 US hardcover. Foreword by Steve Martin. Introduction by Jarrett Earnest]
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The following books were used in the writing of this review: Ada Calhoun, Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me (Grove, 2022); Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems (City Lights Books, 1964); Peter Schjeldahl, Since 1964: New and Selected Poems (SUN, 1978); Peter Schjeldahl, The 7 Days Arts Columns 1988-1990 (The Figures, 1990); Peter Schjeldahl, Let’s See: Writings on Art from the New Yorker (Thames & Hudson, 2008).