Steven Naifeh

Steven Naifeh’s large works find their influence within this grand heritage from the past millennium while deftly integrating the glorious tradition of Geometric Abstraction in the United States and Europe from the past century, from Kazimir Malevich to Frank Stella.

Drawing on a unique artistic biography, Naifeh has created a captivating body of work that is both physically imposing and intricately wrought. The pieces featured here are representative examples of the power and grace of Naifeh's art, as seen in major public installations and museum collections around the globe.

The son of career U.S. diplomats, Naifeh grew up exploring and absorbing the world around him, including its many mesmerizing artistic cultures. His remarkable childhood served as a platform for artistic expeditions across the United States, the Middle East, and Africa. Altogether, by the age of thirty, Naifeh had lived not only in the United States but in Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Oman, the U.A.E., Pakistan, and Nigeria.

Propelled by these experiences, Naifeh returned to the U.S. to pursue his higher education in art history. During his undergraduate studies at Princeton and his graduate research at Harvard, Naifeh's purview expanded beyond the ancient abstract works of his childhood to include the formal academies of industrialized Europe. With a research focus on Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Western European and American art, Naifeh broadened his understanding of the spectrum of material culture created through the ages.

Naifeh's artistic imagination has been the driving force not only of his life as an artist but also of his career as an accomplished writer. His biography Jackson Pollock: An American Saga (written with Gregory White Smith) won the Pulitzer Prize and was the basis for an Oscar-winning film. His most recent work, Van Gogh: The Life (also with Smith), was praised as “the definitive work” on the artist by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

As an artist and author, Naifeh has been profiled in many publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Harvard Magazine, and the International Herald Tribune. He has had solo public exhibitions in major museums and cultural centers in the United States, Turkey, Pakistan, Nigeria, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates. After an early life spent traveling the world, for the past thirty years, he has made his primary home in South Carolina.