Lincoln Kirstein

Lincoln Kirstein went to Europe in 1933 to find a choreographer and came back with George Balanchine, which is the founding act of American ballet. He was the son of a Boston department-store family, wealthy, restless and enormously well read, and had already founded a literary magazine at Harvard and helped start what became the Museum of Modern Art's film department. He wanted an American ballet and understood he could not make one himself. Balanchine agreed to come on the condition, which Kirstein accepted, that a school come before a company: the School of American Ballet opened in 1934, and the companies followed - Ballet Caravan, Ballet Society, and from 1948 New York City Ballet, which he ran administratively for thirty-five years while Balanchine made the ballets. He also wrote constantly and well on dance, art and photography, championed Walker Evans and Elie Nadelman, served in the war in the Monuments unit recovering looted art, and commissioned buildings including the New York State Theater. He was bipolar, spent periods in hospital, and was married for fifty years to Fidelma Cadmus while conducting relationships with men. He gave away most of his money. He said his epitaph should be that he had done what he could with what he had. He wrote Nijinsky Dancing and a study of Elie Nadelman, and edited Dance Index. The Monuments Men recovered works including the Ghent Altarpiece, and he was among the officers who found the Merkers mine. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history