Peter Schjeldahl, a critic whose elegant reviews in The New Yorker and, before that, The Village Voice, made him an indispensable guide to contemporary art, died Friday at his home in Bovina, New York. He was 80.
His wife, Brooke Alderson, confirmed his death. Schjeldahl was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in August 2019 and had undergone unexpectedly successful immunotherapy but never recovered entirely, she said.
Few critics could match Schjeldahl for his intimate knowledge of New York's art world, which he wrote about with undiminished enthusiasm for more than a half-century. Even fewer could rival him for sheer eloquence. A poet by vocation in his earlier years, he brought an exquisite word sense to his polished essays, which managed to translate visual subtleties into lapidary prose.
With a deft flick, he wrote of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres' "glassy, scintillating precision"; of Caspar David Friedrich's "twilight that sears"; and of the "adagio loops and wristy flares" in Willem de Kooning's later paintings. He had a gift for the neat aperçu. "Dadaism was an ancestral vein of cool," he once wrote in The New Yorker. "Those who wondered what it meant could never know."
Schjeldahl had no theoretical program to advance, no overarching interpretation of art history and, in fact, no real urge to pass judgment. "In a way, the advancement of opinions is the least interesting thing about criticism for me," he told the online journal Blackbird in 2004, "but it's one of the essentials to launch you into a situation, into a conversation." He called himself "just another art lover with more time and leisure."
He was first and foremost a visual pleasure seeker, on the prowl for new thrills, and a diligent chronicler of the shifting trends in New York's art scene. In The New York Review of Books in 2009, Sanford Schwartz called him "our best — our most perspicacious and wittiest — art critic."
His penchant for unstinting, sometimes effusive praise made him seem at times more fan than critic. Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion, dismissed him as "a barometer of chic taste," while conceding that he was often "witty and not infrequently astringently perceptive."
When roused, Schjeldahl could let fly with a well-aimed zinger. The Pompidou Center in Paris, he once wrote, "feels like a convention center on the verge of a nervous breakdown." He ridiculed the proliferation of "masterpiece" museum exhibitions with the imagined "Masterpieces of Mesoantarctic Lint."