Lincoln Edward Kirstein (May 4, 1907 – January 5, 1996) was an American writer, impresario, art connoisseur, and cultural figure in New York City. According to the New York Times, he was "an expert in many fields."[1]
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Born in Rochester, New York, the grandson of a successful Rochester clothing manufacturer, he grew up in a wealthy Jewish Bostonian family; his father was president of Filene's Department Store when Lincoln entered Harvard.
In 1927, while an undergraduate (he graduated in 1930), he was annoyed that the literary magazine The Harvard Advocate would not accept his work. With a friend Varian Fry, who later married his sister Eileen, he convinced his father to finance their own literary quarterly, the Hound & Horn. Moving in 1930 to New York, the quarterly became an important publication in the artistic world and lasted until 1934 when Lincoln decided to fund George Balanchine instead.
His interest in Balanchine and ballet started when he saw Balanchine's Apollo performed by the Ballet Russe. He became determined to get Balanchine to America. Together with Edward M. M. Warburg (a classmate from Harvard), they started the School of American Ballet in Hartford, Connecticut, in October 1933. In 1934, the studio moved to the fourth floor of a building at Madison Avenue and 59th Street in New York City. Warburg's father invited the group of students from the evening class to perform at a private party. The ballet they did was "Serenade", the first major ballet choreographed by Balanchine in America. Just months later Kirstein and Warburg founded, together with Balanchine and Dimitriev, the American Ballet.
This became the resident company of the Metropolitan Opera. That arrangement was unsatisfactory because the Opera would not allow Balanchine and Kirstein artistic freedom.
His career was interrupted by the United States' entry into World War II. After enlisting in 1943, before going overseas he started working on a project gathering and documenting soldier art that would eventually become the exhibit and book Artists Under Fire. In the spring of 1944 he was sent to London for the U. S. Arts and Monuments Commission; after a month he was transferred to the unit in France that came to be known as the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) section.[2] Soon after being promoted to Private First Class in January 1945 (in Patton's Third Army), his unit moved to Germany and he was personally involved with retrieving artworks around Munich and in the salt mines at Altaussee. He wrote the article “The Quest for the Golden Lamb” which was published in Town and Country in September 1945, the same month he was discharged from the Army.
In 1946, Balanchine and Kirstein founded the Ballet Society, renamed the New York City Ballet in 1948.[1] He served as the company's General Director from 1946 to 1989.[2]
Kirstein wrote in a 1959 monograph called "What Ballet Is All About":
Kirstein's eclectic interests, ambition and keen interest in high culture, funded by independent means, drew a large circle of friends who stimulated creativity in many of the arts. These included: Glenway Wescott, Monroe Wheeler, George Platt Lynes, Jared French, Bernard Perlin, Pavel Tchelitchev, Katherine Anne Porter, Barbara Harrison, Gertrude Stein, Jensen Yow, Jonathan Tichenor, Cecil Beaton, Jean Cocteau, W. H. Auden, George Tooker, Margaret French, Walker Evans, Sergei Eisenstein and more.
Kirstein kept diaries beginning in summer camp in 1919 until the late 1930's, and Martin Duberman's 2007 biography The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein makes use of them and numerous letters. Kirstein enjoyed sex with men--Harvard undergraduates, sailors, street boys, casual encounters in the showers at the 63rd St YMCA. Longer affairs are described with dancer Pete Martinez, artist Dan Maloney, and conservator Jensen Yow among others, as well as relationships that were physically unrealized. Casual sex frequently grew into long-term friendship.
He also slept with women and in 1941 married Fidelma Cadmus, the sister of the artist Paul Cadmus. He and his wife enjoyed an amicable if not stressful relationship until her death in 1991. Some of his boyfriends lived with them in their East 19th house; "Fidelma was enormously fond of most of them."[3] The New York art world considered his bisexuality an "open secret," although he did not publicly acknowledge his sexual orientation until 1982.
Kirstein was the primary patron of Fidelma's brother, the artist Paul Cadmus, buying many of his paintings and subsidizing his living expenses. Cadmus had difficulty selling his work through galleries because of the erotically charged depictions of working and middle class men, which provoked great controversy.
In his later years, Kirstein struggled with bipolar disorder- mania, depression, and paranoia. He destroyed the studio of friend Dan Maloney, and sometimes was in a straitjacket for weeks at a psychiatric hospital.[3] His illness did not generally affect his professional creativity until the end of his life.
English critic Clement Crisp wrote:—
Kirstein helped organize a 1959 American tour for of musicians and dancers from the Japanese Imperial Household Agency. At that time, Japanese Imperial court music gagaku had only rarely been performed outside the Imperial Music Pavilion in Tokyo at some of the great Japanese shrines.[1]
Kirstein commissioned and helped to fund the physical home of the New York City Ballet: the New York State Theater building at Lincoln Center, designed in 1964 by architect Philip Johnson (1906–2005). Despite its conservative modernist exterior, the glittery red and gold interior recalls the imaginative and lavish backdrops of the Ballets Russes. He served as the general director of the ballet company from 1948 to 1989.
Kirstein's and Balanchine's collaboration lasted until the latter's death in 1983. On March 26, 1984, President Ronald Reagan presented Kirstein with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contributions to the arts.
Kirstein was a serious collector. Early in the history of the Dance Collection, he gave the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts a wealth of rare dance materials. Before his death in 1996, Kirstein donated all his papers, artworks, and other materials related to the history of dance and his life in the arts to the Dance Collection. These treasures in the Kirstein collection will inform future generations' pursuing the knowledge of dance.
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