David Anfam (1955–2024)

British art historian and curatorDavid Anfam, who redefined the canon surrounding Abstract Expressionism, died on August 21 in London. He was sixty-nine. Anfam was known for his rigorous scholarship, but it was his lucid, concise writing style and obvious respect for readers of all types that allowed him to consistently reach and appeal to audiences outside the rarefied art world. His thousand-page 1998 catalogue raisonné of Mark Rothko remains a touchstone for AbEx scholars today, while his 1990 volume on abstract art, part of Thames & Hudson’s World of Art Series, continues to play a major role in making the form accessible to laypeople.

David Anfam was born May 12, 1955, in London. His father was deeply in love with American culture, and thus the young Anfam was “brought up on a diet of Frank Sinatra, jazz, film noir, Hemingway, silk suits, Betty Crocker cake mix and big-finned cars,” which he would later credit with sparking his own interest in AbEx. Suffering from bronchitis as a boy, Anfam while confined to bed paged through art books his parents checked out for him from the library, and by the time he was fifteen, he had set his sights on becoming an art historian. He attended London’s Courtauld Institute of Art, where he earned both his undergraduate degree and his Ph.D, writing his dissertation on Clyfford Still. Following his graduation, in 1984, he took a job delivering Volvos straight from the factory to their future owners. He continued to tout the role long after he had achieved success as an art historian and curator, describing “driving fancy cars at high speeds all over the UK” on his LinkedIn page as “big fun.”

Having been tapped by noted editor Nikos Stangos to write the Thames & Hudson AbEx book in the mid-1980s, Anfam, by then working several part-time lecturing jobs, wrote the book on an Adler typewriter his grandmother had given 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,” he told theBrooklyn Rail’s John Yau in 2010. “The bottom line is that I bought industrial-scale quantities of correction fluid.”

He began work on the Rothko catalogue, which would consume his attention for ten years, in 1989. “Doing the Rothko catalogue was life-changing,” he told Yau. “It was a very taxing challenge physically, since I made a point of wanting to view every single painting. There were people in Washington who basically couldn’t understand why. But the reason was simple—it was not to be a catalogue of photographs, of transparencies. This is a catalogue of things in the real world, and I don’t believe you can understand a work of art unless you physically examine it.”

Other single-artist publications to which he brought the same rigor include those on the work of Pier Paolo Calzolari, Sam Francis, Ed and Nancy Kienholz, Lee Krasner, Brice Marden, Joan Mitchell, Richard Pousette-Dart, Robert Rauschenberg, and Wayne Thiebaud. As well, Anfam contributed prolifically to publications includingArtforum,Artlyst, theArt Newspaper, theBrooklyn Rail, andHyperallergic. He worked as a commissioning editor for Phaidon from 1997—two years before he founded his own art consultancy, Art Exploration Consultancy Ltd—to 2015. Between 2013 and 2020, he served as senior consulting curator and director of the research center at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver.

Among the exhibitions Anfam curated were “Mark Rothko: The Chapel Commission” at Houston’s Menil Collection in 1996; Bill Viola’s “Ocean Without a Shore,” mounted at the Church of San Gallo at the Fifty-Second Venice Biennale in 2007; and the 2015–16 survey “Jackson Pollock’s Mural: Energy Made Visible,” which traveled to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (as part of the Fifty-Sixth Venice Biennale); Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle, Berlin; and the Museo Picasso Málaga, Spain. In 2016, with Edith Devaney, he cocurated the widely lauded exhibition “Abstract Expressionism” at London’s Royal Academy of Arts and the Guggenheim Bilbao, praised in theFinancial Timesas “the most pleasurable, provocative exhibition of American art in Britain this century.” The first major show of AbEx work in the UK in six decades, the exhibition painted a vigorous and vital portrait of the movement, reestablishing its place in the firmament of art. “It was heartening to see young people–doubtless fledgling artists among them–palpably responding to what was on the walls with real enthusiasm,” Anfam told Conrad Carvalho and Caitlin Smyth in an interview for theAshurst Emerging Artist Prizein 2017. “That’s the test of a classic: it reinvents itself over time for new eyes.”