Lincoln Kirstein Biography Quotes 3 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Lincoln Edward Kirstein was born in 1907 in Rochester, New York, and grew up in a prosperous, civic-minded family that later settled in Boston. The household valued the arts and philanthropy, a context that shaped his lifelong belief that culture required both private initiative and public institutions. He attended Harvard University, where he earned an undergraduate degree and a master's degree. At Harvard he began to act on an instinct for institution-building that would define his career, convening colleagues and mentors to support new art, new writing, and new performance in the United States.

Harvard and the Modernist Circle
At Harvard, Kirstein co-founded the literary magazine Hound & Horn with Varian Fry, giving a platform to modernist voices. With classmates including Edward M. M. Warburg and in consultation with figures such as Alfred H. Barr Jr., he co-created the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, mounting ambitious exhibitions that anticipated the program of the fledgling Museum of Modern Art. These endeavors revealed Kirstein's characteristic blend of connoisseurship, administrative drive, and polemical clarity: he wrote criticism, organized institutions, and recruited allies with equal force.

Balanchine and the American Ballet Project
In 1933 Kirstein traveled to Europe, saw the work of choreographer George Balanchine, and conceived a project that would become his life's central mission: to cultivate a distinctly American classical ballet. With support from Edward M. M. Warburg, he invited Balanchine to the United States and, in 1934, co-founded the School of American Ballet in New York. Kirstein was not a dancer; he was the impresario, advocate, fundraiser, and strategist who provided the scaffolding in which Balanchine's choreography could flourish. Early faculty and collaborators brought a rigorous Russian lineage to American students, while Kirstein argued in print for a new public and a new repertory.

Building Companies and Repertoire
Kirstein and Balanchine first fielded the American Ballet, which performed at the Metropolitan Opera before parting ways with that institution. Seeking repertory rooted in American experience, Kirstein founded Ballet Caravan, commissioning works from choreographers such as Eugene Loring and Lew Christensen and scores from composers including Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson. The touring American Ballet Caravan followed, bringing Balanchine's neoclassicism to new audiences in the Americas. Kirstein's efforts connected choreographers, composers, and designers, and he brokered relationships with artists such as Igor Stravinsky that enriched the repertory and the company's musical identity.

War Service and Cultural Preservation
During World War II Kirstein served in the U.S. Army and joined the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program, the group later known as the Monuments Men. He helped document and safeguard artworks displaced by the war in Europe, channeling his administrative acumen and connoisseurship into cultural preservation. The experience deepened his conviction that artistic heritage is a public trust.

Founding New York City Ballet
After the war, Kirstein and Balanchine formed Ballet Society in 1946 as a subscription-based laboratory for new work. In 1948, City Center's Morton Baum offered the group a home as a resident company, and the New York City Ballet was born, with Balanchine as artistic director and Kirstein as its presiding organizer and general director. He oversaw touring, fundraising, governance, and the cultivation of patrons and board members, and he nurtured the careers of choreographers and dancers who would define American ballet, including Jerome Robbins, Maria Tallchief, and Tanaquil Le Clercq. With architect Philip Johnson and civic leaders such as John D. Rockefeller III, Kirstein helped plan the company's move to the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center in 1964, an institutional milestone that reflected his vision of ballet as a durable civic art.

Writing, Publishing, and Visual Arts Advocacy
Parallel to his administrative leadership, Kirstein pursued a substantial literary and curatorial career. His essays and books on dance, including the polemical Blast at Ballet, argued for clarity of style, musical literacy, and historical awareness. He wrote widely on the visual arts and photography, championed the sculptor Elie Nadelman, and contributed the essay to Walker Evans's American Photographs, a landmark in American photographic modernism. He collaborated with the photographer George Platt Lynes on projects that documented dancers and repertory, recognizing how images could build a public memory of ephemeral art. Throughout, his prose was learned, combative, and precise, equal parts advocacy and critique.

Personal Life and Collaborators
In 1941 Kirstein married the painter Fidelma Cadmus, sister of the artist Paul Cadmus. Their home life intersected with a broad artistic milieu that included painters, photographers, designers, composers, and poets as well as dancers and choreographers. Within the company he assembled, he worked closely with Balanchine and later with Jerome Robbins; he helped maintain continuity in the years after Balanchine's death, when Robbins and Peter Martins shared artistic leadership. He cultivated relationships with donors and civic officials, insisting that a great ballet company required steady governance as much as sterling artistry.

Later Years and Legacy
Kirstein remained a guiding presence at New York City Ballet for decades, shaping repertory policies, school standards, and touring strategies. Honors followed, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, reflecting national recognition of his contributions. In his later books, including memoirs, he examined the history he had helped to make and the costs of such endeavor: the complications of patronage, the demands of institution-building, and the persistence required to sustain artistic excellence over time. He died in New York in 1996.

Lincoln Kirstein's achievement rested on a paradox that he embraced: he made himself indispensable to an art form in which he did not perform. By connecting Balanchine's choreography to a school, a company, a theater, a public, and to writers, designers, photographers, and musicians, he created the conditions for American ballet to become a permanent part of national culture. His influence endures wherever the School of American Ballet trains dancers, wherever New York City Ballet performs Balanchine and Robbins, and wherever administrators, artists, and patrons collaborate to make a civic art viable for the long term.

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