The Brooklyn Rail

Regarding the controversial postponement of Philip Guston Now, Peter Schjeldahl writes, “I remain preoccupied by the sense of a crisis that spills beyond the misapprehension of a should-be canonical artist.” Reviewing Janis A. Tomlinson’s biography of the Spanish painter Francisco Goya, Schjeldahl observes, “A good time for thinking about … Goya is while the world stumbles. Crisis becomes him.” Mulling over an exhibition of works on paper mounted at the Drawing Center in December 2020, he remarks, “Do you sometimes imagine that you’re getting used to the emergency? I think I can guarantee that you’re not.” The 2022 Whitney Biennial, again, gives him “an impression of besetting emergency.”

The notion of crisis in its various manifestations—war, illness, addiction—appears throughout The Art of Dying, a collection of Schjeldahl’s final assignments for the New Yorker after his lung cancer diagnosis in 2019. The art critic, who began his career in 1965, lends dignity to his subjects by candidly and assuredly meting out language that would otherwise seem obscure. After all, when the word “crisis” is used elsewhere to call for action, its litany of accompanying obstacles can be often ironically immobilizing. Consider this statement from the editors of the anthology Art Writing in Crisis (2021):

Fires burn around the world. Systemic discrimination persists, precarity is increasing, and the modern democratic project faces challenges from all sides. Art writing helps us to understand art, which in turn helps us to understand such crises. But art writing itself is in crisis.

As a response not only to rarefied art objects but also to these political, ecological, and economic exigencies that directly affect their production, Schjeldahl’s writing serves as a model for criticism in some ways and falls short in others. In terms of the latter, one notices that the forty-five reviews he published between 2019 and 2022 focus predominantly on white artists, save for two group shows and the retrospectives of Sam Gilliam, Faith Ringgold, Oscar Howe, and Robert Colescott, and highlight only major institutions and blue-chip galleries located primarily in New York or nearby.

Nevertheless, The Art of Dying offers clear lessons in style and craft. Apart from Schjeldahl’s eloquence—how he describes, for instance, the “housebroken neoclassicism” of German painter Anton Raphael Mengs, the “Lot’s-wife posture” the princess of Naples assumes in Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), and the way Goya’s paintings convey “jolts of a darkling procession of the immiserated”—there is significance in how the critic turns personal history into a prism through which he refracts the objects of his contemplation to reveal their complexities and contradictions.

Eschewing the critical filters of academic writing, Schjeldahl takes an anecdotal approach, constellating fragments of autobiography—reaching back at times over half a century—to corroborate recent impressions. Writing in March 2022 about Goya’s “The Disasters of War” (1810–20), a series of intaglio prints depicting scenes of violence from the nineteenth-century Peninsular War featured in the Clark Art Institute’s exhibition As They Saw It: Artists Witnessing War, Schjeldahl recalls his father, a WWII vet who seldom spoke of his experiences in battle but suffered from nightmares. In contrast, Schjeldahl managed to avoid the Vietnam War draft in 1966 by appearing at the induction center “drug-addled, sleepless, and unwashed.” In his review, he conjures another image: footage of a “ball of fire” engulfing a Russian helicopter gunship intercepted by a Stinger missile over Ukraine. Moving fluidly between art and politics, past and present, museum and media, Schjeldahl’s nimble analogies do more than outline his subject position. They attest to the limits of first-hand experience and the degree to which knowledge, when mediated through images, becomes contingent upon inference and interpretation.

Often, Schjeldahl’s descriptions of artworks reveal his personal investments in their themes. In his April 2020 essay “Mortality and the Old Masters,” Schjeldahl’s cancer is mentioned parenthetically, but in “Goya and the Art of Survival,” published that September, it colors an account of the painter’s Self-Portrait with Dr. Arrieta (1820). “We see the artist, drastically enfeebled,” Schjeldahl writes, “being attended to by a doctor who is almost comically virile, competent, and concerned. It’s a picture to make you smile through tears.” In a March 2021 review of the New Museum’s exhibition Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, curated by Okwui Enwezor, who died of cancer in 2019, Schjeldahl lingers on Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Procession (1986), a hauntingly spare painting on wood created two years before the artist himself passed away due to a drug overdose. While explicating the show’s allusions to racial profiling, police brutality, and white supremacy, Schjeldahl mourns as much as he extols, all the while tracing personal connections between himself and his interlocutors (he, too, struggled with addiction during his lifetime).

At its best, Schjeldahl’s late prose models how criticism might resemble a brief intersection of two or many lives, as well as how critics can, despite social and political uncertainty, place wholehearted trust in the work that artists do. Artists are after all, as Schjeldahl writes, “undergoing the siege in ways that can alert us to the subjective dimensions of an objective calamity.” Without explicitly subscribing to Marshall McLuhan’s vision of art as a DEW line—“Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it”—Schjeldahl’s reviews emphasize the value of artists’ ability to attend to the inner dimensions of the global systems under which we all operate. As Bertolt Brecht once expressed in an unpublished text quoted by the critic James McAnally, “Crisis is not to be understood as meaning the end of something, but as the term is used in the course of an illness.” Crisis, for Brecht, referred to the “turning point in a disease” where the patient’s situation either improved or deteriorated. Because of his own waning health, Schjeldahl wrote as if he were certain that art and its adherents would survive him.