David Anfam (1955–2024) speaking in 2015 at the press preview of the exhibition Jackson Pollock's Mural: Energy Made Visible at the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle in Berlin. Photo by Adam Berry/Getty Images.
David Anfam was acclaimed as one of the world’s leading scholars on the New York School and foremost authorities on the artists Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko. Few have done as much to reassert the importance of Abstract Expressionism in recent decades. And yet, that was just the cornerstone of a remarkable career that encompassed rigorous investigations into subsequent generations of masters and even younger, contemporary artists who were dear to his heart.
For his formidable knowledge and insight, for his refreshingly lucid, jargon-free writing style, and for his charm and grace, David Anfam will be greatly missed by colleagues, readers, and fans throughout the art world. The much-beloved and distinguished art historian, curator, and writer passed away in August, leaving behind an astonishing legacy that adds new layers of depth to our understanding of the Abstract Expressionist movement and beyond through his many books, articles, lectures, and exhibitions of the last four decades.
Born to Be an Art Historian
David Anfam was born in Kensington, London, in 1955. Beset as a child with chronic bronchitis and partially deaf, he was bedridden for long spells in his childhood, and his parents would bring him art books from the library. He learned to become his own teacher and developed a fiercely independent frame of mind, identifying in later years as an autodidact — which made him identify all the more with his enduring subject, Clyfford Still. “As I couldn’t do things in the conventional way,” he reminisced, “I was more compulsively driven to accomplish them.” By the age of 15, he already knew he wanted to be an art historian.
His path to Abstract Expressionism began early on with a fascination with American culture. He wryly credited his father for raising him on “a diet of Frank Sinatra, jazz, film noir, Hemingway, silk suits, Betty Crocker cake mix and big-finned cars.” Abstract Expressionism was for him the natural next step — and he was devoted from the outset.
Anfam first achieved recognition for his voluminous studies on Clyfford Still, beginning with his doctoral thesis. He earned his undergraduate degree and PhD at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art, completing his doctorate on Still in 1984 under the distinguished Modernist scholar John Golding. As part of his research, he spent a year in the U.S. — riding Greyhound buses and staying in YMCA hostels — tirelessly scouring the country to see Still’s paintings and meet his colleagues and associates in person. This may account in part for the startling originality of Anfam’s fresh insights. Also at play, he maintained, was his cross-cultural and multi-discipline approach that enabled him to make connections to world literature, poetry, music, the cinema, and culture — which he adored. He aspired to bring the works to life for new audiences by offering deep-dives into the larger meanings of the works he wrote about.
Among his countless wonderful articles on the artist is "Hellfire Rising: Looking at Clyfford Still," which he wrote for Phillips in 2015.
Senior Consulting Curator at the Clyfford Still Museum
Soon after The Clyfford Still Museum in Denver was founded in 2011 to manage a vast collection of more than 3,000 works (93% of the artist’s lifetime output) and his complete archives, Anfam was brought on board to serve for 12 years as the museum’s Senior Consulting Curator. He curated five exhibitions there, including Vincent/Clyfford (2012), Memory, Myth & Magic (2013), and The War Begins (2014–15). He further co-curated another four and authored the lead essays for a number of the Museum’s most important exhibitions. In addition, he launched and served as director of the Clyfford Still Museum Research Center, which manages the Clyfford Still Archives and helped organize three symposia on Clyfford Still and Abstract Expressionism around the country.
Anfam Authored the Seminal Introduction to the Abstract Expressionist Movement
Anfam said of Abstract Expressionism: “Without wishing to deny the depth and breadth of Cubism, Surrealism or, later, Pop Art, some would say that Ab Ex at least matches and arguably even exceeds their intricacy and diversity. This alone makes Ab Ex different from what had come before. It incorporated most of those earlier things – and then some.”
He succeeded in bringing the movement to life in his 1990 book on Abstract Expressionism for Thames & Hudson’s World of Art series. A testament to his genius at making complex issues accessible to the general art public, it remains to this day the single most highly recommended introduction to the movement. It didn’t come easy. He reminisced to John Yau in the Brooklyn Rail that he typed out the manuscript on an old an Adler typewriter his grandmother gave him for his sixteenth birthday: “Honestly, I sweated blood on it, and I know I couldn’t write that book again because in 40,000 words I had this incredible, preposterous challenge of trying to condense one of the most complex single modern art movements, alongside Cubism and Surrealism. The bottom line is that I bought industrial-scale quantities of correction fluid.” Nonetheless, the book was a resounding success.
Championed by academics for his tireless and meticulous scholarship, Anfram consistently delivered penetrating insights in a captivating, jargon-free, and accessible style that spoke to art lovers at every level. Art writing in the 1990s was typically riddled with jargon. Anfram was adamant in his refusal to indulge. “If there’s one business I take with absolute deadly seriousness,” he once said, “it’s every word committed to the page.”
Anfam’s Magnum Opus on Mark Rothko
David Anfam’s expansive 1998 catalogue raisonné Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas — nearly a decade in the making — remains the definitive scholarly work on the artist. An expansive 1,000-page work, featuring over 830 paintings, 400 of them previously unrecognized, it was awarded the 2000 Mitchell Prize for the History of Art, the 1998 George Wittenborn Memorial Award, and was listed as a book of the year in the New York Times, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Daily Telegraph and The Irish Times. Highlighting the importance of Anfam’s opus, critic John Russell hailed it as “a book for all seasons.”
He reminisced in the interview with John Yau: “Whenever I went to a museum or to a collector to see a painting [one of my standard lines] was: I’m not too interested in the front of your Rothko, it’s the back I‘m after. It’s on the back that you have a material history of Rothko. The versos had obvious things, such as labels, but they also had lots of less routine details — inscriptions, often tiny writing or marks—so I’d always take a magnifying glass. I scoured the crossbars, strainers, and stretchers. I believe Marx once said, 'You only find what you’re looking for.'”
What he found led time and again to startling new revelations. Aiming in this tome to shed new light on Rothko, he included 100 pages of text elucidating the context and significance of Rothko’s achievement. “One has an obligation, a scholarly duty,” he once said, “to explain the raisonné part of the catalogue, the reasoning, literally.” An extraordinarily engaging writer, he introduced fresh interpretive frames with penetrating scholarly insights that leapt off the page.
David Anfam was appointed the Luce Visiting Professor at Brandeis University and — after nearly a decade working on his catalogue raisonné of Rothko’s works on canvas at the at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. — he returned to London to serve for nearly 20 years as Commissioning Editor for Fine Art at Phaidon Press, among the world’s most prestigious publishers.
Among the Most Important Ab Ex Exhibitions of Our Times
As a curator, Anfam was every bit as ambitious. His 2016–17 landmark exhibition Abstract Expressionism at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (co-curated with Edith Devaney) was the first major exhibition of its kind in the UK in over 60 years and the largest survey ever of the Abstract Expressionists in Europe. The Financial Times hailed it as “the most pleasurable, provocative exhibition of American art in Britain this century.” Anfam mused, “Maybe the ultimate test of top drawer Ab Ex is whether it can still do something for successive generations who were born after it. At the RA it was heartening to see young people — doubtless fledgling artists among them — palpably responding to what was on the walls with real enthusiasm. That’s the test of a classic: it reinvents itself over time for new eyes.”
Other Notable Curations
Among David Anfam’s most recent curations was Lynda Benglis: In the Realm of the Senses at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, 2019–2020 — a concise mini-retrospective of the Post-Minimalist master’s career, featuring 36 sculptures — which was championed by Cathryn Drake in Artforum as making “a convincing case for her oeuvre as a coherent whole, in all of its variety an exploration of ambiguous states of being.”
As part of the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, Anfam curated Jackson Pollock's Mural: Energy Made Visible at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection at the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni to reunite Pollock’s monumental touchstone masterpiece of 1943 with the spirit of his ardent supporter Peggy Guggenheim and shed new light on a pivotal moment in the artist’s career. Previously, in 2007, for the 52nd Venice Biennale, he curated Bill Viola's Ocean Without a Shore in the Church of San Gallo, which was widely viewed as a highlight of the Biennale.
Beyond Still and Rothko
David Anfam didn’t stop at Clyfford Styll and Mark Rothko. In 2009, he contributed to a catalogue raisonné for Anish Kapoor that was published by Phaidon Press. He was also a consulting advisor on the catalogues raisonnés for Jack Tworkov and the Brazilian painter Iberê Camargo. Since 1977, Anfam established himself as an important voice in the art world, publishing regularly in The Art Newspaper, Artforum, Art History; Art in America, Artlyst, The Brooklyn Rail, The Burlington Magazine, and Hyperallergic — and he gifted the world innumerable fresh insights on a great many Post-war masters.
Of particular interest are his stand-alone publications on Sam Francis, Richard Pousette-Dart, Brice Marden, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed & Nancy Kienholz, Wayne Thiebaud, Pier Paolo, Joan Mitchelland, and Lee Krasner. He additionally wrote in-depth essays on numerous masters, including Arshile Gorky, Max Beckmann, David Smith, Ad Reinhardt, Milton Avery, John Chamberlain, Robert Motherwell, Mark Tobey, Hans Hartung, Sam Francis, Richard Pousette-Darte, Robert Rauschenberg, Norman Lewis, Howard Hodgkin, Anish Kapoor, Günther Förg, Dorothea Rockburne, James Turrell, and Carroll Dunham.
So too was Anfam’s engagement with global Contemporary art boundless. He is celebrated by many for championing a stunning array of later generations and younger and lesser known artists, including: Renate Aller, Ali Banisadr, Koen van de Broek, Stefan Gierowski, Jonas Burgert, Piero Dorazio, Jeff Elrod, Zeng Fanzhi, Stefan Gierowski, John Hoyland, Yun Hyong-Keun, Rod Penner, Elliott Puckette, Clifford Ross, William Scott, and Julian Stanczak. He saw the legacy of Abstract Expressionism in their achievements and endless exciting possibilities for the future of art — and he delighted in sharing his passions with the world, with a generosity truly rare among scholars of his stature.