|  Photograph by Ada Calhoun “Lung cancer, rampant. No surprise. I’ve smoked since I was sixteen, behind the high-school football bleachers in Northfield, Minnesota,” Peter Schjeldahl wrote, in 2019, about receiving the diagnosis from his doctor, by phone, while driving upstate from the city to meet his wife. He added, “After the call, I found myself overwhelmed by the beauty of the passing late-August land. At mile eighty-one of the New York State Thruway, the gray silhouettes of the Catskills come into view, perfectly framed and proportioned. How many times had I seen and loved the sight? How many more times would I? I thought of Thomas Cole’s paintings, from another angle, of those very old, worn mountains, brooding on something until the extinction of matter.” Schjeldahl, who was the art critic at The New Yorker for more than two decades, died on Friday, at the age of eighty. He continued writing, finding the beauty in the world around him—and in works old and new—in the years after his diagnosis, turning in a piece on Piet Mondrian just weeks ago. In a Postscript, David Remnick writes that Schjeldahl had “a poet’s voice—epigrammatic, nothing wasted.” For more reading, we’ve collected some of Schjeldahl’s visionary criticism from over the years. | 
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