David Anfam was a uniquely engaging and eminent figure in the worlds of art history, art education and curation. He is best known for scholarship that broadened and deepened our understanding and appreciation of Abstract Expressionism, especially the work of Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Jackson Pollock. However, throughout his career he was continually expanding his fields of connoisseurship. He wrote and lectured prolifically, on sculpture and installation art as well as painting, embracing minimalism, Arte Povera, the Pop generation and the work of diverse, international contemporary artists. 

His background was mysterious. He was born in London on 12th May 1955, but within a few years the family withdrew to Portslade in East Sussex. This change in circumstance was connected to David’s father’s activities in the London underworld; he would take his own life when David was still an undergraduate. The name Anfam is West African in origin – David’s paternal grandfather was from Ghana. David’s mother was also a woman of secrets, with a complicated past in India that he only discovered after her death. 

Browsing picture books during long childhood illnesses awakened his interest in art – notably, he said, reproductions of Nicolas Poussin’s paintings. A bout of measles at age eight left him with impaired hearing, which he cited as intensifying his visual consciousness. It also made him an autodidact; unable to hear in class, he did his real learning alone in the library. The family encouraged the boy’s precocious cultural interests, his father turning him on to all things American – films, jazz, Hemingway and Fitzgerald – and often taking him to the Brighton Art Gallery (as well as to the London race courses). 

In 1973 David began a BA at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. After achieving a first, he commenced directly, at the suggestion of his mentor John Golding, on a doctorate examining the art of Still. He completed his thesis in 1984, and it would lead to David’s key roles, some thirty years later, in the establishment and activities of the Clyfford Still Museum, Denver. Before then, immediately after leaving the Courtauld he survived for around five years principally on part-time college teaching. One breakthrough came with a call around 1989 from the National Gallery, Washington, engaging him to compile the catalogue raisonné of Rothko’s oils on canvas. This massively authoritative catalogue, with its major critical introduction, was published by Yale University Press in 1998 and won the Mitchell Prize. It took nine years of research, during which David criss-crossed the United States – indeed the globe – to inspect first-hand each of Rothko’s more than eight hundred paintings. Another deeply influential project was a commission from Nikos Stangos at Thames & Hudson to write a volume on Abstract Expressionism for the World of Art series. This appeared in 1990 and remains a standard reference text. 

From 1997 to 2015 he worked as a commissioning editor for Phaidon Press scouting for and nurturing much new talent. Simultaneously he established his own consultancy practice, Art Ex Ltd. – significantly, the abbreviation stands not for ‘expertise’ but rather for ‘exploration’. The full record of David’s prodigious writing and curating is impossible even to précis here.[1] 

Although he never got over the loss of Fred, he threw himself into further work for a host of public institutions and private galleries. Throughout his career he safely navigated the sometimes murky art world waters, protected by his own probity and good faith. He always wore his great learning lightly, and lectured – without notes – with a mild, witty informality of style that made one feel included rather than intimidated. Of great value in the face of David’s departure from us is the wealth of videos, often available online, of him giving lectures and interviews. 

A volume gathering together some of his essential writing and speaking on art would be invaluable. Recognition of his contribution to cultural history – better, to culture itself – will only increase. 

[1] It is available on his Wikipedia page, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Anfam, and at the Art Ex website, davidanfam.com, both accessed 29th November 2024. 

[2] Reviewed in this Magazine, 132 (1990), pp.438–40; 135 (1993), pp.657–58; 139 (1997), pp.146–57; 153 (2011), pp.281–83; and 158 (2016), pp.851–53. 

[3] Rothko: reviewed in this Magazine,132 (1990), pp.502–03;150 (2008),pp.498–500; and 161 (2019), pp.494–96. De Kooning: reviewed in this Magazine, 134 (1992), pp.464– 67; 136 (1994), pp.266–67; 138 (1996), pp.218–19; 143 (2001), pp.784–85; 145 (2003), pp.57–59; and 154 (2012), pp.297–99. 

[4] D. Anfam:‘“Of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated”: aspects of Clyfford Still’s earlier work’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 135 (1993), pp.260–69; idem: ‘A note on Rothko’s “The Syrian Bull”’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 139 (1997), pp.629–31; and idem: ‘De Kooning, Bosch and Bruegel: some fundamental themes’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 145 (2003), pp.705–15.