Book Review
An Imperial American
The complex, contradictory Lincoln Kirstein
by Eugene R. Gaddis
Lincoln Kirstein ’30 combined a ferocious intelligence with manic energy, a belief that there was nothing he could not do, and a passionate conviction that if the arts and letters flourished, beauty might save the world.
Kirstein preferred a certain degree of personal ambiguity, if not mystery, which could be attributed to both an underlying shyness and a calculated slyness. In his College class’s senior album, he declined to list his field of study. (It was the fine arts.) During World II, he held the rank of private first class in the United States Army, but it was said that he delayed sewing the stripes on his custom-tailored uniform for as long as possible. Throughout his long tenure as president of the School of American Ballet and general director of the New York City Ballet, he was the formidable master-impresario, the creator and preserver of both institutions, but he seemed gleeful in pointing out that the uninitiated at Lincoln Center “have trouble figuring out who I am.” By the 1980s, however, public recognition of his contributions to literature, the fine arts, and dance had widened to the point that such anonymity was no longer possible. To John Russell, then chief art critic for the New York Times, he was “one of the most valuable of living Americans.” “A living national treasure,” declared Susan Sontag.
He appeared to dismiss such encomiums, yet Kirstein was intensely self-conscious in every sense of the word, and he had immortal longings. He documented everything he did. He had his own image preserved in oil, tempera, gouache, ink, pencil, and bronze. Guests at 128 East 19th Street in the 1980s had the pulse-quickening experience of conversing with their host against a backdrop of his portraits by Lucien Freud (powerful but unfinished after fisticuffs between subject and artist), Pavel Tchelitchew (a tryptych, including the subject as a standing nude in boxing gloves), Jamie Wyeth (who moved in for months to hone his skill in portraiture, clocking 58 sessions to achieve a likeness in a style reminiscent of Sargent and Eakins), Michael Leonard (Kirstein in khaki with cats), David Langfitt (Kirstein as a retired German submarine commander). Fidelma Cadmus (Kirstein’s wife of 50 years, who depicted him as suspicious and vulnerable), and Martin Mower (his Harvard faculty mentor), as well as an eerie self-portrait done in sanguine on paper when he was an undergraduate. He could be contemplated three-dimensionally in portrait heads by Isamu Noguchi (commissioned by Kirstein while at Harvard) and Gaston Lachaise, who also did a striding nude. These icons kept company with sculptures of Abraham Lincoln, William Shakespeare, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Kirstein was not inaccurate when he told John Russell: “I’m an imperial American.”
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