Lincoln Kirstein, Father of Ballet in U.S., Dies at 88

NEW YORK —  Lincoln Kirstein, one of the most influential figures in 20th century American arts and letters who is credited with bringing choreographer George Balanchine and ballet as an art form to America, died Friday. He was 88.

Kirstein died in his Manhattan home of natural causes, according to Jeffrey Peterson, a spokesman for the New York City Ballet, which Kirstein co-founded.

“We have lost a founder, a father, a friend,” said Peter Martins, the current head of the New York City Ballet.

As a young Harvard graduate in 1933, when the U.S. had no ballet tradition, Kirstein believed that bringing classical dance to America could aid in renewing the country, then in the throes of the Great Depression.

He picked out the Russian-born Balanchine, then nearly penniless in Europe, as a genius who could harness the unique energy of America and make it the center of a renaissance in classical dance. Kirstein brought Balanchine to New York, where they founded the School of American Ballet and then a succession of companies, culminating in the birth of the New York City Ballet in 1948.

The company swiftly gained international recognition and produced works that are now in the repertories of dance troupes around the world.

Dance critic Francis Mason wrote: “What Pope Julius II did for Michelangelo is nothing compared to Kirstein’s commitment to Balanchine.”

Balanchine was only one among many of this century’s leading artists who owed at least some of their prominence to Kirstein’s faith and advocacy. From an early age, Kirstein had developed sophisticated tastes and a dauntless resolve to back what he liked.

His precocious influence became evident in 1927, when he was a Harvard sophomore. Kirstein and fellow student Varian Fry founded a literary review, Hound & Horn. It survived for only seven years, but has a firm place in literary history because it brought early recognition to several of this century’s best known poets, authors and artists, and was the first to publish some of their now-famous works. They included T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, E.E. Cummings, Katherine Anne Porter and Walker Evans.

Kirstein at the time was leading the transformation of the American art scene that led to the focus on modern art. In 1929, with Edward M. M. Warburg and John Walker III, he co-founded the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art. It put on the first American exhibitions devoted to modern art, displaying the work of then little-known artists such as Alexander Calder, Georgia O’Keeffe, Georges Braque, Joan Miro and Man Ray.

The Harvard Society was a direct precursor of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, for which Kirstein became an important advisor while still an undergraduate.

In his own right, Kirstein was a gifted and prolific writer, with more than 40 published works. In addition to works on dance, his bibliography includes a novel, volumes of poetry (among them “Rhymes of a Pfc.,” written while he served in Europe during World War II), books about artists, and in 1994, “Mosaic,” the first of what was meant to be a two-volume autobiography.

It was Kirstein’s enthusiastic vision and reputation for artistic taste that persuaded donors to back his plans for a ballet school and company. He served as manager of both.

In the early 1960s, through his friendship with New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, Kirstein arranged for a major hall to be built at New York’s then-new Lincoln Center to provide a grand home for the company. He picked a close friend, architect Philip Johnson, to design it.

Kirstein was born May 4, 1907, in Rochester, N.Y., the second of three children of Louis E. Kirstein and Rose Stein Kirstein. When he was 5, the family moved to Boston. After several failed efforts in business, his father became a partner in Filene’s department store and made a fortune.

Kirstein told art critic John Russell in 1982: “When I got out of college in 1930, [his father] said, ‘Look here, I’m going to leave you a lot of money. Do you want it now or when I die?’ I said, ‘I want it now,’ just like that, and he gave it to me. That was the only way I could do what I have done. He gave me utter freedom, and I used it.”

As a young man, Kirstein had strong artistic ambitions of his own; in addition to writing poetry and fiction, he painted and longed to become a dancer. But early on he recognized that he could make his biggest contribution by facilitating the work of others. In 1918, at age 11, he first saw ballet, a brief divertissement performed by the Chicago Opera Company.

“Whatever it was that lurked as an imaginative need, ‘ballet’ stuck in my elementary judgment as a luminous magnet,” he wrote in his memoirs.

In 1929, while in Europe researching a college thesis, Kirstein had a chance encounter that later seemed an omen. On a walk through Venice, he came upon a crowded funeral that he soon learned was for Sergei Diaghilev, the great Russian ballet impresario and founder of the Ballets Russes. Diaghilev had used talented young choreographers, contemporary composers and modern artists to breathe new life into ballet. Within a few years, Kirstein was to pick up where Diaghilev left off, using Diaghilev’s last choreographer: Balanchine.

Before the 1930s, European ballet companies--including Diaghilev’s troupe--had visited the United States, and some European dancers had opened small schools here. But the country had no indigenous tradition of performances and no true ballet company.

Kirstein and Balanchine founded the School of American Ballet in 1934, and launched the first of several touring companies. But Kirstein’s plans for a permanent company were interrupted by World War II, during which he served in the Army, briefly as a driver for Gen. George S. Patton.

In May 1945, after Nazi officials gave orders to blow up the booty to prevent the Allies from recovering it, Kirstein and an army captain rescued from an Austrian salt mine, wired with explosives, a trove of nearly 10,000 artworks, including a Michelangelo Madonna and the famed Ghent altarpiece by van Eyck.

After the war, Ballet Society, the last of the touring companies, was renamed and given a fixed home. The New York City Ballet gave its first performance Oct. 11, 1948, at the City Center theater.

. People who knew them well said Kirstein and Balanchine had a very harmonious working relationship but were never close friends. Balanchine was notoriously preoccupied with the women dancers in the company, who gave him artistic inspiration, and had few close male friends.

Kirstein’s relationships with women were more ambiguous. In 1941, he married Fidelma Cadmus, a painter and sister of artist Paul Cadmus.

However, in his memoirs, Kirstein wrote of relationships with men. He stated that in his early years, “Emotionally, or rather romantically, I enjoyed guiltless liaisons with both girls and boys. . . . From my earliest boarding schools, I slept with whomever I liked or whoever liked me, with no guilt, resentment or fear.”

Kirstein gravitated to ballet because its emphasis on hierarchy, beauty, courtly manners and strict discipline appealed to him.

He also had a passion for films, and was largely responsible for bringing about the 1990 movie “Glory,” about the first black volunteer regiment in the Civil War. The film was based in part on Kirstein’s book “Lay This Laurel,” an essay on the regiment and the Augustus Saint-Gaudens sculpture memorial to it on Boston Common.

In 1989, Kirstein officially retired and was given emeritus titles with the company and school. But for some time after that he remained an important presence at both.

In his last years, although he became increasingly reclusive, he continued to write and publish.