When I used to subscribe to The New Yorker I would look forward to Peter Schjeldahl’s articles about the art world. More often than not, the artists he wrote about were unfamiliar to me, but that never seemed to matter because he wrote with such energy, color, and humor, and because he was always so opinionated and entertaining. He died in 2020, having been diagnosed with lung cancer some time earlier. Between diagnosis and death, he published more than forty articles and these have been collected in The Art of Dying. The first of them is the celebrated and deeply moving autobiographical piece he published in The New Yorker. “Lung cancer, rampant. No surprise. I’ve smoked since I was sixteen, behind the high school football bleachers in Northfield, Minnesota”. Buy the book for this essay alone.

There are pieces in this collection about artists I don’t know. Charles Ray and Faith Ringgold, for example. I read first the articles about artists and places I know well such as Morandi, Holbein, and Storm King, seeing and appreciating them in slightly new ways thanks to Schjeldahl’s intelligence, perceptiveness and humor. He was a one-off, as Steve Martin’s tribute at the beginning of the book recalls; contrary, funny, and brilliant. I read The Art of Dying while dipping into Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, a collection of his writings from 1988 to 2018. I receommend them both.