Prince of Angels

In a day when governments (but not the U.S.) and philanthropic foundations have all but taken over the art-patron business, Manhattan's Lincoln Kirstein, 45, is a pillar of individualism. In the past 20 years he has spent close to half a million dollars of his own money to commission and produce new music and ballets, chiefly for the vigorous New York City Ballet and its forerunners. To Patron Kirstein last week came a fittingly symbolic award: $500 and a citation from Manhattan's Capezio Inc., the U.S.'s largest makers of ballet slippers, "for distinguished service to American Dance."

Kirstein hardly needed the money, but the citation was no more than his due. No man has done more to put U.S. ballet on its toes.

Dancers from All Over. Ever since he graduated from Harvard (1930), Lincoln Kirstein has been pushing his close-cropped head and broad shoulders into the arts. As the son of the board chairman of Boston's Filene's department store, he could afford to lose money on his ventures, and often did. Among them the expensive, respected but short-lived highbrow magazine Hound & Horn, Harvard's Society for Contemporary Art a novel, a book of poems, a scholarly book on the dance.

At 25, Kirstein faced up to it: ballet interested him most of all. He found that existing U.S. dance troupes were far from good enough. "They were ragged and individualistic, with no particular style because their dancers came from all over." He decided to start a school. Out of his School of American Ballet came the American Ballet Company, which danced at the Metropolitan Opera for three years, the touring Ballet Caravan (1936-41), then Ballet Society (1946-48), and finally the New York City Ballet.

An Actual Profit. "I knew that it would take ten years to establish a company based on one style," he says. "Once I got the school going, the rest was inevitable, just like a chemical reaction." He decided the style should reflect the elegance of the European court ballet tradition, and that the man to furnish it was famed Russian Choreographer George Balanchine. Kirstein induced him to leave Europe (where he had been Diaghilev's chief choreographer) and take over both the school and the performing companies.

"We are selling about 70% of our seats every week now," says Kirstein. "I don't have to spend money except for commissions." Next week the troupe will finish the longest run (twelve weeks) any ballet company has ever had in the U.S., and should wind up with an actual profit.

Lincoln Kirstein is now managing director of the New York City Center, with theater and opera groups also under his wing. He aims to raise these two groups to the same level of esteem the ballet troupe has won. Kirstein already has blueprints for a new Manhattan theater building with room for a ballet school, theater workshop and an opera studio. When will it be finished? "Within ten years." Its chances of success? "A sure thing."

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