Peter Schjeldahl, the eminent and widely read New York art critic, died Friday at his country home in the tiny upstate town of Bovina, near the Catskills, where he and his wife, former actor Brooke Alderson, lived. He was 80.
In the mid-1960s, Schjeldahl (pronounced SHELL-doll) began to contribute gallery reviews to the Village Voice, where he would join the staff full time in the following decade. Since then, there was barely a moment when his eloquent, lapidary observations on art old and new could not be read — in addition to the Voice, in the New York Times, ArtNews, Art in America, 7 Days and other magazines, plus assorted gallery catalogs. In 1998 he began a nearly 24-year stint on the art critic's perch at the New Yorker where, following the New York School's 1950s heyday, Harold Rosenberg had held forth. Like Rosenberg, the great champion of Willem de Kooning's paintings, Schjeldahl was similarly enthralled with the Dutch immigrant, treasuring a simple abstraction the artist brushed on newsprint. It held pride of place in the writer's apartment in Manhattan's East Village.
I met Schjeldahl early in 1982. He had sent me a fan letter (remember mail?) at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, where I worked, after I defended a controversial June cover piece he wrote for the Village Voice. Its subject was the newly reviving Los Angeles art scene, which had risen like a rocket in the '60s, stumbled in the '70s, and was experiencing a veritable boom. His article, a decidedly mixed review of the goings-on, burst the local bubble of excitement.
