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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. ''Jackson Pollock: An American Saga'' was published on December 24, 1989.〔 ''The Philadelphia Enquirer'' 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." ''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. The book stirred global controversy by debunking the widely accepted theory that Van Gogh committed suicide and arguing instead that village bullies shot him. “As a tale of ambition, hard-fought fleeting triumphs and dark despair,” said the ''San Francisco Gate'', “it has the dramatic pull of a gripping nineteenth-century novel. … () biography enriches the eye. Its insight and vast information vault readers into the work of Van Gogh and the artists of his time. It deepens the experience of looking at art." “A tour de force,” said the ''Los Angeles Times'', a “sweepingly authoritative, astonishingly textured book." His co-author, partner, and husband, Gregory White Smith, battled a rare brain tumor for four decades, dying in 2014 at the age of 62.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://baltic-review.com/2014/04/gregory-white-smith-pulitzer-prize-winning-author-of-jackson-pollock-and-van-gogh-the-life-dies-at-62 )〕 ==Personal life== Naifeh was born to U.S. diplomats in Tehran, Iran, on June 19, 1952. 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. 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.” Naifeh graduated summa cum laude from both St. Andrew’s School in Middletown, Delaware, in 1970 and Princeton University in 1974. He graduated from the Harvard Law School in 1977, and received a master’s degree in fine arts, also from Harvard, in 1979.〔 His undergraduate thesis on the New York Art World was published by Princeton University in 1976. and his Ph.D. dissertation on the artist Gene Davis was published in 1982. Naifeh received honorary doctorates from the University of South Carolina Aiken in 1998 and the Juilliard School in 2012.〔 In 1989, along with Gregory White Smith, he purchased the Joye Cottage in Aiken, South Carolina in 1989.〔http://www.aikenstandard.com/article/20140418/AIK0401/140419367/1031/smith-naifeh-a-look-at-two-men-s-accomplishments〕 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.” They are leaving the house to the Juilliard School as a residence for artists in music, drama, and dance. Since 2009, Naifeh has served as co-chairman of Juilliard in Aiken Festival, a performing arts festival that brings dozens of artists to Aiken each year for performances and has provided educational outreach to more than 16,000 students in an area covering parts of Georgia and South Carolina. 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. James R. Oestreich wrote in the ''New York Times'' that the performance contained “flashes of brilliance, all right. But what made the event so deeply satisfying was mainly the consistent excellence of all its parts.” Naifeh married Gregory White Smith, his co-author and partner of 40 years, in 2011.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Steven Naifeh」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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