Peter Schjeldahl

American art critic, poet, and educator (1942–2022)

Peter Charles Schjeldahl ('/ʃ//ɛ//l//d//ɑː//l///; March 20, 1942 – October 21, 2022) was an American art critic, poet, and educator. He was noted for being the head art critic at The New Yorker, having earlier written for The Village Voice, ARTnews, and The New York Times.

Schjeldahl was born in Fargo, North Dakota, on March 20, 1942. His father, Gilmore, was the inventor of the airsickness bag, and whose company produced NASA’s first communications satellite; His writings also appeared in Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. He also taught at Harvard University in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies for four years during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Schjeldahl's poetry falls in line with many of the characteristic themes and styles of the New York School. As a contemporary postmodern poet, Schjeldahl believed that poetry should be enjoyed and understood by all readers. In an interview with the Virginia Commonwealth University's Blackbird, Schjeldahl commented on how "there are no rewards in being obscure or abstruse or overbearing." Schjeldahl's poetry often addresses common experiences or familiar events. His poem “My Generation” opens: "Vietnam/ Drugs/ Civil Rights/ Rock/ Watergate/ (in that order? )/ Are the blows of history/ That have left my generation/ Its peculiar battered silhouette." In an interview with Blackbird, Schjeldahl stated that "writing things that people want to read is my bread and butter." In 1980 he received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism by the College Art Association. The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute named Peter Schjeldahl the winner of the 2008 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing. The prize was established in 2006 to recognize writers who advance public appreciation of visual art in a way that "is grounded in scholarship yet appeals to a broad range of audiences." It comes with a $25,000 honorarium and an award designed by architect Tadao Ando. Carleton College bestowed an honorary degree, a Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, to Schjeldahl as part of their commencement exercises on June 13, 2015. Seven years later, he was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, "for accessible and dedicated art criticism that introduces or revisits painters, institutions and movements, offering tender appreciations and unflinching dissents".

Schjeldahl married and later divorced a woman whom he publicly referred to as "L."