The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A rich and revelatory biography of one of the crucial cultural figures of the twentieth century.
Lincoln Kirstein’s contributions to the nation’s life, as both an intellectual force and advocate of the arts, were unparalleled. While still an undergraduate, he started the innovative literary journal Hound and Horn, as well as the modernist Harvard Society for Contemporary Art—forerunner of the Museum of Modern Art. He brought George Balanchine to the United States, and in service to the great choreographer’s talent, persisted, against heavy odds, in creating both the New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet. Among much else, Kirstein helped create Lincoln Center in New York, and the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut; established the pathbreaking Dance Index and the country’s first dance archives; and in some fifteen books proved himself a brilliant critic of art, photography, film, and dance.
But behind this remarkably accomplished and renowned public face lay a complex, contradictory, often tortured human being. Kirstein suffered for decades from bipolar disorder, which frequently strained his relationships with his family and friends, a circle that included many notables, from W. H. Auden to Nelson Rockefeller. And despite being married for more than fifty years to a woman whom he deeply loved, Kirstein had a wide range of homosexual relationships throughout the course of his life.
This stunning biography, filled with fascinating perceptions and incidents, is a major act of historical reclamation. Utilizing an enormous amount of previously unavailable primary sources, including Kirstein’s untapped diaries, Martin Duberman has rendered accessible for the first time a towering figure of immense complexity and achievement.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A central figure in 20th-century American modernism, Lincoln Kirstein (1907 1996) edited a pioneering literary magazine and was the driving force behind George Balanchine's revolutionary New York City Ballet. Bancroft Prize winner Duberman (Charles Francis Adams) reveals in his absorbing biography a man blessed, agonizingly, with great artistic taste and vision unaccompanied by artistic talent. Born of a wealthy Jewish family but unable to personally finance his many schemes, Kirstein became a frenzied impresario of the avant-garde, perpetually sweating out budget shortfalls and opening night reviews and pestering philanthropists for funds to bring high-brow dance to suspicious but increasingly receptive American audiences. His was a high-wire life despite artistic triumphs, NYCB teetered on the brink of bankruptcy for decades sustained by a stupendous manic energy (later darkening into demented fits that necessitated electroshock) and enlivened by a parade of lovers of both sexes, including his own brother. Kirstein met everyone from Martha Graham to General Patton. Through Kirstein's funny, perceptive diary jottings and letters, Duberman paints an engaging portrait of bohemian New York and its high-society patrons. Kirstein's tornado life and crazy-quilt projects can be bewildering, but Duberman conjures an indelible sense of a creative urge that became a tortuous pilgrimage toward an enigmatic muse. 36 pages of photos.