Steven Naifeh

Steven Naifeh (born June 19, 1952) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American biographer of both Jackson Pollock and Vincent van Gogh.

In addition to writing 18 books with Gregory White Smith, Naifeh is a businessman who founded several companies, including Best Lawyers that spawned an industry of professional rankings.

He is also an artist whose geometric abstractions, many large in scale, have been exhibited widely throughout the world over a period of 45 years.

Naifeh was born to U.S. diplomats George Naifeh and Marion Naifeh in Tehran, Iran, on June 19, 1952.

His father is of Lebanese descent.

In addition to several cities in the U.S., he lived with his parents during their postings in Baghdad, Iraq; Baida, Libya; Benghazi, Libya; Lagos, Nigeria; Karachi, Pakistan; Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; Muscat, Oman; and Amman, Jordan.

He began painting at age ten in Libya, studying with a Dutch-born artist, Catharina Baart Stephan.

He later studied, at age fifteen, with Bruce Onobrakpeya, one of the leading Nigerian artists of the twentieth century.

He had exhibitions in both Kano and Kaduna, Nigeria, and in Karachi, Pakistan.

Naifeh graduated summa cum laude from St. Andrew's School in Middletown, Delaware, in 1970.

In 1974, he had an exhibition at McCormick Hall, site of the Princeton University Art Museum, and, in 1975, he had an exhibition in Abu Dhabi, the first exhibition of art created there in the city's history.

"An Exhibition in Abu Dhabi is a rare happening," Barbara Hughes wrote in the U.A.E. News.

"But an exhibition of work mainly created in Abu Dhabi is probably unique."

He then attended Princeton University and graduated summa cum laude with an A.B. in history in 1974 after completing a senior thesis titled "Culture Making: Money, Success and the New York Art World."

His undergraduate thesis on the New York Art World was published by Princeton University in 1976.

He graduated from the Harvard Law School in 1977, and received a master's degree in fine arts, also from Harvard, in 1979.

and his Ph.D. dissertation on the artist Gene Davis was published in 1982.

Jackson Pollock: An American Saga was published on December 24, 1989.

The Philadelphia Inquirer called the book "Brilliant and definitive … so absorbing in its narrative drive and so exhaustively detailed that it makes everything that came before seem like trial balloons."

In 1989, along with Gregory White Smith, he purchased the Joye Cottage in Aiken, South Carolina in 1989.

Together, they restored the historic Whitney-Vanderbilt house, a creation of both Stanford White and Carrère and Hastings.

The story of that renovation is told in their book, On a Street Called Easy, In a Cottage Called Joye, which The New York Times called "wry and gentle … house-and-garden renovations gone delectably awry."

He published Jackson Pollock: An American Saga in 1989, which won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and was also a finalist for the National Book Award.

Interview Magazine said of the book, "For once, with this intense, engrossing, and indeed brilliant work, we have a biography that justifies its length. Seldom have the history of an artist, the development of his imagination, and the fevers of his soul been more grandly yet intimately described."

Time Magazine wrote: "Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, whose 1989 biography of Jackson Pollock won the Pulitzer Prize, have written this generation's definitive portrait of the great Dutch post-Impressionist. … Their most important achievement is to produce a reckoning with van Gogh's occasional 'madness' that doesn't lose sight of the lucidity and intelligence – the profound sanity – of his art."

The Boston Globe wrote: "Now, at last, with 'Van Gogh: The Life' by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, we have what could very well be the definitive biography … And how pleased we should be that Naifeh and Smith have rendered so exquisitely and respectfully van Gogh's short, intense, and wholly interesting life."

In addition to English, Van Gogh: The Life has been published in Dutch, German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese and is being translated into Italian, Polish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Naifeh received honorary doctorates from the University of South Carolina Aiken in 1998 and the Juilliard School in 2012.

The book was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film by Ed Harris in 2000, Pollock.

Harris said the biography was "the bible for the project and remained so until filming was completed."

The biography also served as an inspiration for John Updike's Seek My Face.

"It would be in vain," Updike wrote, "to deny that a large number of details come from the admirable, exhaustive 'Jackson Pollock: An American Saga.'"

Since 2009, Naifeh has served as co-chairman of Juilliard in Aiken Festival, an annual performing arts festival in Aiken.

Van Gogh: The Life, which Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called "magisterial," was published in 2011 with a companion website hosting over 6,000 pages of notes.

Naifeh married Gregory White Smith, his co-author and partner of 40 years, in 2011.

Naifeh worked as an intern in the office of Congressman Charlie Wilson, as a docent at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and as an associate attorney at the law firm of Milbank Tweed.

He was the author—all, except for the first book, co-authored with Smith—of many books including five New York Times bestsellers.

Naifeh also wrote Van Gogh: The Life, which was called "the definitive work for decades to come" by Leo Jansen of the Van Gogh Museum, in 2011.

His co-author, partner, and husband, Gregory White Smith, died in 2014 at the age of 62, having lived with a rare brain tumor for four decades.

The 2014, Festival culminated in an early-music performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion that was presented not only in Aiken but in Spivey Hall in Atlanta and Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center.