David Anfam, Leading Scholar of Abstract Expressionism, Dies at 69

David Anfam, a British art historian who won acclaim as one of the world’s leading experts on the Abstract Expressionist art movement and wrote seminal works on the painters Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, died on Aug. 21 in London. He was 69.

His death was announced by the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, where he worked as a senior curator from 2013 to 2020. The announcement did not provide a cause of death or specify the location.

After working overtime for years as a lecturer at universities around London, Dr. Anfam burst into prominence in 1990 with a relatively slim but hugely influential book simply called “Abstract Expressionism.”

In that work and throughout his career, he pushed against the received wisdom that the severe abstraction of artists like Still and Rothko had emerged solely from earlier Modernist movements like Surrealism and Cubism. Instead, he argued, they drew from a wider and older set of inspirations — Rothko from the Dutch masters, Still from Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh.

By the time “Abstract Expressionism” appeared, Dr. Anfam was already a year into his next major project: a catalogue raisonné of Rothko’s major works. Published in 1998, the book covered 830 Rothko paintings over some 1,000 pages, including 400 that had been unknown or unrecognized.