Peter Schjeldahl
Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic. He came to the magazine from The Village Voice, where he was the art critic from 1990 to 1998. Previously, he had written frequently for the New York Times’s Arts and Leisure section. His writing has also appeared in Artforum, Art in America, the New York Times Magazine, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. He has received the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute; the Frank Jewett Mather Award from the College Art Association, for excellence in art criticism; the Howard Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, for “recent prose that merits recognition for the quality of its style”; and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the author of four books of criticism, including “The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings,” and “Let’s See: Writings on Art from The New Yorker.” His latest book is “Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings, 1988-2018.”
All Work
- The Art World
Edward Hopper and American Solitude
Pandemic or not, the artist’s masterly paintings explore conditions of aloneness as proof of belonging.
June 1, 2020
- Postscript
Susan Rothenberg’s Asteroidal Impact on the New York Art World
Susan Rothenberg’s kinetic and powerful works helped spark a rebirth of Expressionism, beginning in the mid-seventies. She died this week, at seventy-five.
May 20, 2020
- The Art World
Dorothea Lange and Félix Fénéon at MOMA, and Online
The museum’s halls are closed to visitors, but the Depression photographer and the Parisian art-world anarchist are well worth a digital outing.
May 11, 2020
- The Art World
Mortality and the Old Masters
Once we are again free to wander museums, the objects won’t have altered, but we will have, and the casualties of the coronavirus will accompany us spectrally.
April 6, 2020
- The Art World
The Dark Revelations of Gerhard Richter
Though the artist was previously indirect in his references to the horrors of the Third Reich, he has reason to focus on them now, in a retrospective at the Met Breuer.
March 9, 2020
- The Art World
The Cold, Imperious Beauty of Donald Judd
At MOMA, a retrospective of the artist’s work showcases his rigorous visual intelligence.
March 2, 2020
- The Art World
The Lasting Influence of Mexico’s Great Muralists
Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros created a movement with galvanizing effects north of the border.
February 24, 2020
- The Art World
The In-Your-Face Paintings of Peter Saul
His cartoony style and subjects exalt sensation as an end in itself.
February 10, 2020
- Personal History
The Art of Dying
I always said that when my time came I’d want to go fast. But where’s the fun in that?
December 16, 2019
- The Art World
The Art of War in “Theater of Operations”
Can an exhibition about the Gulf wars provide new ways of seeing such dismal subject matter?
November 25, 2019
