Peter Schjeldahl, who died on Friday, wrote for The New Yorker for more than two decades. “A voice is what he always had: distinct, clear, funny,” David Remnick writes. “A poet’s voice—epigrammatic, nothing wasted.”
Sometimes a writer, an artist, a human being is so defiant of mortality that you begin to take him at his word. Just a few weeks ago, Peter Schjeldahl, who has beenart critic for a generation, handed in a review of a newly translated biography, by Hans Janssen, of the Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian.
Critical attention to him may rise and fall. For anyone undertaking to pay it, though, there can be no ups or downs in Mondrian’s importance, relative to other artists past, present, and to come. There is only a steady state of inexhaustible meaning, beggaring comparison and defying definition. Even the critically consummate Janssen, with his magnum opus of a biography, can merely dance around, and not penetrate, the adamantine conundrum of the Dutch magus’s dead stops in lived time.
As we were going to press this Friday, word came that Peter had died. It’s hard to imagine what he must have summoned to write like that in his last weeks. In 2019, Peter learned that he had advanced lung cancer. He had started smoking when he was sixteen. When I asked if he was going to give up the habit at last, he said, “I’ve smoked a million cigarettes, and I’ve enjoyed every one.
Even if you were prepared to argue the logic of this, you weren’t going to get anywhere. Peter was a man of well-developed opinions, on art and much else. He was someone who, after being lost for a time, knew some things about survival. We met more than twenty years ago. I was looking to hire a full-time art critic. I’d read him for years in the. And a voice is what he always had: distinct, clear, funny. A poet’s voice—epigrammatic, nothing wasted.
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