Peter Schjeldahl Obituary

Peter Schjeldahl was a poet, art critic, and educator from the United States. Schjeldahl was born on March 20, 1942, in Fargo, North Dakota.

His father, Gilmore, invented the airsickness bag and founded the company that built NASA’s first communications satellite; his mother, Charlene worked in Gilmore’s office.

He attended Carleton College and The New School for Social Research. In 1962, he began his professional writing career as a reporter for The Jersey Journal in Jersey City and Minnesota and Iowa.

Peter Schjeldahl entered art criticism purely out of a love of art, which he developed in part while studying in Paris in the early 1960s. “Most of what I know in a scholarly way about art I learned on deadlines to sound as if I knew what I was talking about — as, little by little, I did,” he later wrote.

He was well-known as The New Yorker’s chief art critic, having previously written for The Village Voice, ARTnews, and The New York Times.

Peter Schjeldahl passed away on October 21, 2022, at the age of 80. Although the cause of death of Schjeldahl has not been officially determined, he was diagnosed with lung cancer at the age of 77 in 2019.