13 Facts About Steven Naifeh

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

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

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

Steven Naifeh later studied, at age fifteen, with Bruce Onobrakpeya, one of the leading Nigerian artists of the twentieth century, who received the Living Human Treasure Award from UNSCO in 2006.

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

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

From 2009 until 2014, Steven Naifeh served as co-chairman of Juilliard in Aiken Festival, an annual performing arts festival in Aiken.

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

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

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

Together with Smith, Steven Naifeh founded the legal publishing company Best Lawyers in 1981 which published The Best Lawyers in America, a peer-review list, in 1983.

Steven Naifeh returned to painting and sculpting in 1998, creating works of geometric abstraction based on geometric formulas from medieval art from southern Spain to northern India but closely related to the works of such twentieth-century western masters as Frank Stella and Sol Lewitt.

Steven Naifeh has had numerous exhibitions, including one at the Columbia Museum of Art in the summer of 2013.