Steven Naifeh

Steven Naifeh
Born (1952-06-19) June 19, 1952 (age 72)
NationalityAmerican
EducationPrinceton University
Harvard Law School
Harvard Graduate School of Fine Arts
OccupationAuthor
Websitewww.stevennaifeh.com; www.vangoghbiography.com; www.bestlawyers.com

Steven Naifeh (born June 19, 1952) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American biographer of both Jackson Pollock[1] and Vincent van Gogh.[2] In addition to writing 18 books with Gregory White Smith, Naifeh is a businessman who founded several companies, including Best Lawyers[3] 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.[4][5]

Jackson Pollock: An American Saga was published on December 24, 1989.[1] 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."[6] Van Gogh: The Life, which Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called "magisterial,"[7] was published in 2011 with a companion website hosting over 6,000 pages of notes.[8]

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.[9]

  1. ^ a b Smith, Gregory White (1989). Jackson Pollock: An American Saga. Clarkson Potter. ISBN 0517560844.
  2. ^ Smith, Gregory White (2011). Van Gogh: The Life. United States: Random House. ISBN 978-0375507489.
  3. ^ Smith, Gregory White. "Best Lawyers in America". Woodward/White, Inc. Retrieved 13 May 2014.
  4. ^ Agbese, Dan (August 19, 1969). "Op Art' Another Medium of Artists' Expression". New Nigerian.
  5. ^ Ecker, Heather (2014). Found in Translation. New York: Leila Heller Gallery.
  6. ^ Smith, Gregory White (1989). Jackson Pollock: An American Saga. Back Cover: Clarkston Potter. ISBN 978-0517560846.
  7. ^ Kakutani, Michiko (20 October 2011). "The Persona and the Palette". The New York Times. Retrieved 13 May 2014.
  8. ^ Smith, Gregory White. "Van Gogh: The Life". Woodward/White, Inc. Retrieved 13 May 2014.
  9. ^ "Gregory White Smith Obituary". The Baltic Review. Retrieved 21 May 2014.