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.

The book cemented Dr. Anfam’s reputation for dogged and precise research; a quarter-century later, it remains the leading reference for Rothko’s work.

Dr. Anfam was an art historian cut from classical cloth: deeply engaged in archives and materials, skeptical of theory and insistent on crisp, evocative prose. He filled out that impression with a deep curiosity for aesthetic experience in any form, be it painting, travel or wine (he preferred French whites from Alsace).

It was as a scholar of Still’s work that Dr. Anfam left his most indelible mark. Though Still was already well known as an early leader of the Abstract Expressionist movement, very little scholarship on his painting existed until Dr. Anfam came along.

He first tackled Still in the late 1970s, as a doctoral student at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. He spent two months crisscrossing the United States, riding Greyhound buses and sleeping at Y.M.C.A.s in an effort to see all of the artist’s work. (He tried to meet Still, but that famously reclusive painter refused.)

His perseverance gave Dr. Anfam a unique appreciation for the physicality of Still’s style, as well as for the subtle changes that marked Still’s shift from figuration in the 1930s to abstraction in the 1940s and ’50s. And his travels gave him a keen sense for how Still’s work engaged with the wide-open expanses of the American heartland.

“My first sight of the Great Plains was eye-opening — I’d never been in that kind of flatness before,” he told The Brooklyn Rail in 2009. “And in a way it dovetailed with a lot about Clyfford Still and his experience of the space of the West.”

Dr. Anfam’s reputation as a Still scholar made him an obvious early hire when the Clyfford Still Museum was founded in Denver in 2006. (It opened in 2011.)

He was among a small group who traveled to a secret warehouse in Maryland, where Still had stored the vast majority of his work — nearly 3,000 items — having refused to release it to the public during his lifetime. They would now become the property of the museum.

“Through brute will, Still kept almost his entire output intact,” Dr. Anfam told The New York Times in 2007. “I’ve been waiting 31 years for this, since I first started writing about him, and finally — pinch me — I’m here.”

David Anthony Neil Anfam was born on May 12, 1955, in London, to Eileen (Weston) and Harold Anfam. As a child he suffered from repeat bouts of bronchitis and other diseases that left him effectively deaf, as well as bed-bound for months at a time. It was during those spells, which he spent poring through art books, that he developed a passion for painting. By age 15, he knew he wanted to be a curator.

He studied art history at Courtauld and received his doctorate in 1984.

The Courtauld is one of the world’s greatest institutions for the study of art history and conservation; nevertheless, having graduated into an era of higher-education budget cuts under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, he struggled to find an academic job. He spent his first year delivering cars to wealthy customers before finding work as a lecturer.

“I went for one year of my life without a thought,” he told The Brooklyn Rail. “Just driving the Volvos from the factory, from the garage, to their new owners. It was a blissful nirvana of thoughtlessness.”

The success of his book on Abstract Expressionism made him increasingly in demand as a curator and critic, and he eventually left teaching behind. He founded his own company, Art Exploration Consultancy, in 1999.

Dr. Anfam’s longtime partner, Frederick Bearman, died in 2016. He is survived by four siblings, Janice, Pauline, Gillian and Gloria; two others, Derek and Trevor, died before him.

Though he was best known for his work on the titans of Abstract Expressionism, Dr. Anfam also championed more contemporary artists; over the years he wrote catalogs and curated shows on Jonas Burgert, Philippe Vandenberg and Anish Kapoor. And he found himself drawn to painters from earlier centuries.

“I am starting to grow weary of abstraction,” he said in a 2018 interview for the website of the Ashurst Emerging Artist Prize, for which he was a judge. “At the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam on Christmas Day, I stumbled across a still life of peaches by the 17th-century painter Adriaen Coorte that I scrutinized for almost a quarter of an hour. Years ago I’d probably never even have noticed it.”