The arts in America have been historically advanced by private philanthropy and visionary leaders of individual institutions such as Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art. A third driver, the impresario, though a familiar phenomenon in European cultural life, has been almost entirely missing on these shores. The lone exception is the figure of Lincoln Kirstein, currently the subject of an exhibition at moma.1

Kirstein was born in 1907 (he died in 1996) and grew up in Boston, the son of a successful retailer who bankrolled his son’s many efforts and initiatives, sparing him the need to earn a living. Kirstein fils seems to have come out fully formed, since the building blocks of his sensibility—and future direction—were in place early: smitten by ballet, writing poetry and plays, sketching, taking piano lessons, and attending opera and symphony orchestra performances all by early adolescence. There remained only one more: the decision, made in his early twenties, that he wished to become the American version of Sergei Diaghilev, the founder of the legendary Ballets Russes, whose most important and influential member was George Balanchine. It was an ambition that Kirstein realized a decade or so later.

Kirstein launched his first avant-garde projects while a student at Harvard, in part, he said, to jolt staid Boston out of its complacent, retrograde taste: Hound & Horn, a literary review dedicated to publishing obscure or unknown writers; and the Harvard Society for Contemporary