What Kirstein wrought

The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein, by Martin Duberman, New York, Knopf, 2007; 736 pages, $37.50.

A dynamo of the arts, Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996) promulgated his independent thinking and classical taste with exceptional chutzpah. In a massive new life history, The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein, emeritus CUNY professor and prolific biographer Martin Duberman attempts to delineate this imposing, intrepid, charming, neurotic and cantankerous figure, who in subtle and still-surfacing ways changed the cultural face of America. The primary instigator and driving force behind the New York City Ballet, Kirstein was a critic, poet, editor and collector, as well as a loud--and ultimately excluded--voice at the Museum of Modern Art during its first two decades.

In a crisp Italianate style--a la eiero or Masaccio--Pavel Tchelitchew's insightful 1938 painting Portrait of Lincoln Kirstein (not reproduced in the book, although the volume does contain numerous documentary photos) presents its subject in triplicate. Kirstein appears simultaneously as an intellectual in a business suit; as a no-nonseuse courtier with arms folded across his red baseball jacket; and as a naked boxer, a fighter for his various causes. Tchelitchew rightly depicts this modern Renaissance man not simply as an American Medici, but as a complex sensual being of the Freudian age.

A skilled juggler of projects and relationships, Kirstein seems to have been fueled by his multiple personalities. With a steady stream of male lovers and a 50-year marriage to Paul Cadmus's sister, Fidelma, his personal life was a complex puzzle even to himself. His work, however, almost always took precedence over private matters. Even while a student at Harvard, Kirstein was eager to use his family money for the good of the culture at large. Well into his 30s, he repeatedly tapped his wealthy Boston father--a magnate of the Filene's department store consortium-to keep his various enterprises afloat.

Besides being involved with the famed New York ballet troupe, Kirstein played a key role in other less celebrated endeavors that are touchstones in American culture: Hound and Horn (1927-34), probably the most important American literary journal of its time; the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art (1929-31), a freewheeling modernist exhibition club; Ballet Index (194249), a fascinatingly arcane journal of dance history that included covers and features by Joseph Cornell; and Connecticut's American Shakespeare Festival (1954-82). Over the years, as promoter and enabler, Kirstein organized exhibitions and/or commissioned works or performances by Elie Nadelman, Gaston Lachaise, Walker Evans, Tchelitchew, Paul Cadmus, Sergei Eisenstein, Isamu Noguchi, Honore Sharrer, Jerome Robbins, George elatt Lynes, W.H. Auden and Igor Stravinsky. He introduced Latin American art to MOMA, arranged American tours of kabuki and gagaku groups, and tried to stand up for esthetic interests in the compromised development of Lincoln Center.

Lobbying in boardrooms, cajoling donors and working fiendishly behind the scenes, Kirstein emerged as a complex paradigm of the can-do American, groomed to realize his obsessions. Indulged by his parents, he saw his first ballet at age 12 and the next year attended Anna Pavlova performances five nights in a row. Never a conventional good student, he entered Harvard only after two failed attempts at admission, and then used the university chiefly as a base for his own projects. With classmate Varian Fry, he founded Hound and Horn, which published the likes of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and proved an excellent calling card on Kirstein's first trips on his own to Europe. Abroad, he met many of the leading writers and artists of the time, including Romaine Brooks, Natalie Barney, Christian Berard, Katherine Anne Porter, Constantin Brancusi, Janet Flanner, Tchelitchew, Stephen Spender and E.M. Forster.

Back at Harvard in two rooms rented from the school, he and two wealthy college friends started the Society for Contemporary Art, which exhibited new works by Picasso, O'Keeffe, Calder, Lachaise, Archipenko and the Mexican muralists. Although operating on a shoestring budget, the Society managed to draw substantial crowds, with attendance averaging 13,500 for the first two years. One show focused on Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House. Displaying contemporary art as well as decorative objects, photographs, folk art, architectural drawings, and graphic and industrial designs, the ever-experimental Society was used as a model by Alfred Barr in the formative years of MOMA. When Kirstein moved to New York after graduation, Barr enlisted him to organize a slew of curatorial projects, even attempting unsuccessfully to have him head the new MOMA film department.

Entering the Manhattan artistic scene in 1931, Kirstein fell under the spell of free-spirited hostess Muriel Draper, who provided bohemian lore, political consciousness-raising and a sympathetic ear for Kirstein's tales of bisexual intrigue. She also introduced him to the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff, whose philosophy of self-will and action-oriented individualism struck a lasting chord. The early '30s were Kirstein's salad days, overflowing with new characters and experiences. Duberman's biography skims over encounters that cry out for elaboration. Among the host of fascinating sidebar events are Kirstein's somewhat contentious 1931 trip with Walker Evans to photograph New England Victorian architecture, his 1932 tour of gay-friendly sailor bars with Sergei Eisenstein and the near-censorship of a 1932 exhibition of murals he curated at MOMA. (The show, including works that several trustees found "Communistic," was allowed to open only after Nelson Rockefeller, then a museum adviser, obtained last-minute approval from trustee J.P. Morgan.)