Mosaic: Memoirs - Hardcover

Kirstein, Lincoln

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374213364 ISBN 13: 9780374213367

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994

Synopsis

The evocative reminiscences of one of America's great men of modern American culture focuses on Kirstein's youth and early struggle for identity, from his childhood in Boston to his world travels, culminating in his 1933 attempts to bring Balanchine to the U.S.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

This memoir by the octogenarian Kirstein (Portrait of Mr. B, 1984) displays a Proustian sensibility in its wholesale allegiance to art and the senses and in its nostalgic tableau vivant of times and places past. From its astonishing, sensual opening sentence (``The pear was plump, ripe, juicy, palm jade''), this is the story of the education of Kirstein's aesthetic sensibility and its fulfillment in his most lasting achievement, the founding of the New York City Ballet. Despite its revealing tone, it is not intimate (due partly to sometimes stuffy prose), yet it is almost always engaging. This self-portrait shows the young Kirstein to be by turns charming and expansive, self-deprecating and confused as he learns that, contrary to his hopes, he is not destined to be an artist. Kirstein is the son of German Jews who penetrated the upper reaches of Boston society. Gifted with what he calls ``nervous energy'' and a wealthy, supportive papa, the self-described hedonist pursues his artistic and amorous fancies from Harvard to Paris to New York City. The strange highlights of Kirstein's life shine through: An encounter with the mystic Gurdjieff is at once chilling and comic; pursuing the low life, Kirstein conceives an unrequited love for a gritty sailor. The chapters dealing with Kirstein's precocious founding of Hound & Horn and the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art are oddly devoid of passion; but the grand spectacle of his life, narrated in this volume's last chapter, begins in 1933. In Paris, where he seeks out the ballet, the intrigues and jealousies of artists, dancers, and stage mothers are topped only by the supreme wiles of Romola Nijinsky, in whose service Kirstein finds himself. Kirstein, now an impresario-in-training, courts George Balanchine, hoping he will found a ballet school and company--in Hartford, Connecticut. Of course, a Balanchine-led Hartford Ballet was not to be. One hopes that Kirstein's elliptical ending is the promise of another volume to complete his colorful mosaic. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Kirstein ( Movement and Metaphor ), a pivotal figure in the arts best known as a founder of the New York City Ballet and its associated school, also established and edited a literary quarterly, the Hound & Horn , organized the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art (which later evolved into the Museum of Modern Art) and has contributed richly to American culture as a critic and historian of dance and visual art, as a poet and as a collector. His memoirs give a resiliently irascible intelligence a fresh opportunity to play and work. The memoirs cover a span beginning in Kirstein's childhood (he was born in 1907) and leading up to 1933, when he sought out George Balanchine in Europe to help assemble the beginnings of the NYCB. Kirstein's reflections are personal, insightfully assessing people encountered in his youth (e.g., the critic R. P. Blackmur at Harvard) and during travels abroad; aesthetic (his "strident 'modernism' " took early root); and philosophical. Part of Kirstein's fascination is his eccentricity: though aided with a family fortune (his father was a partner in Filene's department store in Boston), his aggrandizing, energetic vision seems singularly entrepreneurial; though he is known as a stern advocate of the virtues of classicism, his pugnacity seems as likely to challenge or to oppose as it does to submit or assimilate. Kirstein's caustic urbanity and questioning wit are critical and companionable by turns in this selective survey of his past.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0374213364
• ISBN 13: 9780374213367
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 268