Farewell to Peter Schjeldahl, prominent American art critic

Art critic Peter Schjeldahl, one of the world’s most influential names in contemporary art, passed away yesterday at the age of 80.Schjeldahl passed away at his home in Bovina, New York State, after being diagnosed with lung cancer in 2019. The news was given on Twitter by the New Yorker magazine, for which Schjeldahl had been writing since 1998.

Born in Fargo, North Dakota, on March 20, 1942, the son of Norwegian-born entrepreneur and inventor Gilmore Tilmen Schjeldahl and Charlene Hanson, he first studied in Minnesota, at Carleton College in Northfield, and then at the New School in New York, and began working as a journalist in 1962 at The Jersey Journal in Jersey City. After a trip to Paris in 1964 he returned to New York in 1965 and began writing about art for magazines such as ARTnews, The New York Times, and The Village Voice (for the latter magazine he wrote from 1990 to 1998). In 1998 the final move to The New Yorker, for which he became a leading art critic. His articles were then occasionally published in magazines such as Artforum, Art in America, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. Between the 1990s and early 2000s he also taught at Harvard.

His most important articles have since been collected in several publications (the most recent is Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light. 100 Art Writings 1988-2018). Schjeldahl also curated major exhibitions of several American and international artists: notably the Willem De Kooning exhibition organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1974, the Jean Dubuffet exhibition at the Pace Gallery in New York in 1980, and the major monographic exhibition of Cindy Sherman at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1987. Schjeldahl particularly studied the art of De Kooning and that of Dubuffet, on which he wrote numerous essays and curated several major exhibitions. He also complemented his career as an art critic with a career as a poet, classifiable in the category of postmodern poetry. Awards won by Schjeldahl include the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism, the Clark Prize for art writing in 2008, and an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Carleton College.

Farewell to Peter Schjeldahl, prominent American art critic

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.