The Art of Dying: Writings, 2019-2022

by Peter Schjeldahl, Steve Martin (Foreword by), Jarrett Earnest (Introduction)

Overview

The complete last essays of acclaimed writer Peter Schjeldahl, the great art critic for The New Yorker

When The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl published his widely read autobiographical essay “The Art of Dying” in December 2019, he reported that he had lung cancer and his oncologist had given him six months of life. His treatment was showing some improvement, and, he wrote, “These extra months are a luxury that I hope to have put to good use.” And so he did. The Art of Dying: Writings, 2019–2022 begins with that essay and collects all 47 pieces that he wrote for the magazine before his death in October 2022. These last works form a moving portrait of Schjeldahl’s hard-won reflections on art and life, against the backdrop of an intensely anxious period in America, spanning the pandemic, the George Floyd protests, the, 2020 presidential election, and the war in Ukraine. Schjeldahl, who was the leading art writer of his generation, wrote with generosity and openness about the art world during these tempestuous three years. Comedian Steve Martin contributes a foreword and critic and curator Jarrett Earnest contributes an introduction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781419773259
Publisher:	Abrams Press
Publication date:	05/06/2025
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.35(d)

About the Author

Peter Schjeldahl was the art critic for The New Yorker for 24 years until his death in 2022. He was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism. Prior to that, he wrote art criticism for Seven Days and the Village Voice. In 2019, Abrams published his Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings, 1988-2018, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.


Jarrett Earnest is a writer and curator, and the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (2018). He lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

Peter Schjeldahl wrote things that made you put down the magazine or shut the laptop or slowly slip the phone back in your pocket. Things that were so good you needed to take a minute. He was the leading art critic of his generation … but he was better than that. You could adore art or not be especially interested in it. You could concur or passionately disagree. It didn’t matter: You would read Schjeldahl just to read sentences by him. … The pieces in his new posthumous collection, The Art of Dying, were all written … after Peter was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer in 2019. The doctors told him he had six months to live. But he undertook experimental treatment, and, miraculously, it worked. He lived three more years. The collection, then, is haloed by a quality of grace, almost of intercession. It is filled with terrific examples of Peter doing what he did best.

The Washington Post Sebastian Smee

★ 04/08/2024

New Yorker art critic Schjeldahl, who died in October 2022, puts his “almost freakish gift for the English language” (in the words of critic Jarrett Earnest) on full display in this brilliant essay collection. In 2019, the author announced his lung cancer diagnosis in the title essay, which is less a rumination on mortality (“I find myself thinking about death less than I used to”) than a clear-eyed consideration of the art of criticism. Covering such subjects as Edward Hopper, the Storm King Art Center in New York State, and painter Faith Ringgold, Schjeldahl’s essays showcase his pithy eloquence (“Nearly every house that he painted strikes me as a self-portrait, with brooding windows and almost never a visible... inviting door,” he writes of the sense of solitude in Edward Hopper’s paintings); plainspoken enthusiasm (“I loved it!” he exclaims about a 2020 exhibit of French figure drawings at the Clark Art Institute); and willingness to rethink previous judgments and see anew, as he did about the merits of Pop Art painter Peter Saul. Above all, the collection is a testament to Schjeldahl’s unique ability to make tangible art’s emotional effects on the viewer, as in his description of how Peter Saul’s “pictures mount furious assaults on the eye, leaving you with indescribable.... choreographies of one damned thing after another.” This posthumous collection will be a gift to Schjeldahl’s admirers and a revelation to those new to his work. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Brilliant … a testament to Schjeldahl’s unique ability to make tangible art’s emotional effects on the viewer … This posthumous collection will be a gift to Schjeldahl’s admirers and a revelation to those new to his work.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A gorgeous memento mori from a singular writer.”—Kirkus (starred review)

“Peter Schjeldahl wrote things that made you put down the magazine or shut the laptop or slowly slip the phone back in your pocket. Things that were so good you needed to take a minute. He was the leading art critic of his generation … but he was better than that. You could adore art or not be especially interested in it. You could concur or passionately disagree. It didn’t matter: You would read Schjeldahl just to read sentences by him. … The pieces in his new posthumous collection, The Art of Dying, were all written … after Peter was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer in 2019. The doctors told him he had six months to live. But he undertook experimental treatment, and, miraculously, it worked. He lived three more years. The collection, then, is haloed by a quality of grace, almost of intercession. It is filled with terrific examples of Peter doing what he did best.”—Sebastian Smee, The Washington Post

From the Publisher

★ 2024-03-20
Notes on dying from a man who did an excellent job of living.

Schjeldahl (1942-2022) was best known as an art critic, a role he held at the New Yorker right up until his death at the age of 80. He made the East Village his home for most of his life, but his roots were in the Midwest—a fact that perhaps explains why he was able to make art accessible without dumbing it down or pandering. The title essay was published after he was diagnosed with incurable lung cancer. The author writes about his life in a discursive style that he has, as an elderly man facing death, surely earned, but these vignettes hang together and offer a portrait of a life spent in search of beauty in an era largely defined by cynicism. Always a keen observer, Schjeldahl manages the neat trick of seeming to place himself outside the frame even when he serves as his own subject. For example, he recounts winning a Guggenheim grant to pen a memoir that never happened because he used that money to buy a tractor—rather than time to write. Relating this story, he quotes Susan Sontag, whom he recounts meeting in another anecdote that seems more self-effacing than it is. This author knows his place in cultural history, and he wants us to remember it; he just doesn’t want to brag about it. The rest of this volume includes Schjeldahl’s final pieces for the New Yorker, many written during the global pandemic, a time when the author was uniquely equipped to talk about how we might think about art in the face of death. In the foreword, Steve Martin notes, “It’s easy to think you can write like Peter, intrepidly flinging words around, but it’s dangerous.”

A gorgeous memento mori from a singular writer.

Kirkus Reviews