Mosaic

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. (May)