Art historian and former Clyfford Still Museum (CSM) senior consulting curator David Anfam died on August 21 in London.
Anfam saw the artist’s 1979 retrospective at The Met in New York, New York while researching the artist as a doctoral student. Defended in 1984, his dissertation on Still was one of the first in-depth studies of the artist. For the next two decades, he continued to publish pivotal scholarship on Still. “Anfam was the world’s foremost expert on Clyfford Still in the decades following the artist’s death,” said Bailey Placzek, CSM’s curator of collections and catalogue raisonné research and project manager. “His scholarship sustained Still’s legacy during that time and has been critical to CSM’s ongoing documentation and understanding of the artist’s collection since it came to Denver in 2011.”
Soon after Patricia Still selected the City and County of Denver to receive the collection, the Museum’s inaugural director, Dean Sobel, invited Anfam to participate in the project. In 2007, Anfam and Sobel traveled to Maryland to view Still’s collection in storage for the first time. When the Museum opened in 2011, Anfam was named CSM’s consulting curator, and assisted Sobel in selecting works for the Museum’s Inaugural Exhibition.
As senior consulting curator, a position he held until 2020, Anfam curated five exhibitions for the Museum, including several of CSM’s first thematic exhibitions: Vincent/Clyfford (2012), Memory, Myth & Magic (2013), and The War Begins (2014–15). He also co-curated four exhibitions at CSM with Sobel and Placzek, including Repeat/Recreate (2015) and Clyfford Still: The Works on Paper (2016–17). He authored the lead essays for CSM’s Clyfford Still: The Artist’s Museum (2012), Repeat/Recreate (2015) and Clyfford Still: The Late Works (2020) exhibition catalogues.
Alongside curator Edith Devaney, Anfam co-curated Abstract Expressionism (2016–17), the landmark exhibition organized by the Royal Academy of Arts in London in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. “Abstract Expressionism included nine major paintings from the Clyfford Still Museum’s collection,” said Placzek. “It brought some of Still’s most powerful, previously unknown works to light on an international stage and reasserted Still as a leading figure of the abstract expressionist movement.”
From 2013 to 2020, Anfam directed the Clyfford Still Museum Research Center, which invited scholars to conduct original research in the Clyfford Still Archives. The Center also co-organized three symposia on Clyfford Still and Abstract Expressionism at national venues between 2013 and 2017.
Director Joyce Tsai shared, “Anfam helped to lay the foundation of scholarly and curatorial excellence during his involvement with the Museum; we continue to build upon the strength of that work. His absence will be felt across the field.”
