The Museum of Modern Art Celebrates the “Live Eye” of Lincoln Kirstein and His Influence at MoMA and Beyond

Shantel Harris -
N e w   Y o r k ,   U S A - 

Paul Cadmus Set Design for 1937 Ballet Filling Station
Image: MoMA

New York, on November 5, 2018 — The Museum of Modern Art announced Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern, an exhibition exploring Lincoln Kirstein’s sweeping contributions to American cultural life in the 1930s and ’40s, on view from March 17 through June 30, 2019.

Best known for co-founding the New York City Ballet, Kirstein (1907–1996), a polymathic writer, curator, editor, impresario, tastemaker, and patron, was also a key figure in MoMA’s early history. With his prescient belief in the role of dance within the museum, his championing of figuration in the face of prevailing abstraction, and his position at the center of a New York network of queer artists, intimates, and collaborators, the impact of this extraordinary individual remains profoundly resonant today. Seen through the lens of Kirstein, the works in the exhibition reveal an alternative and expansive view of modern art. Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern is organized by Jodi Hauptman, Senior Curator, and Samantha Friedman, Associate Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, MoMA.

Evans Kirstein. Photo: MoMA

Kirstein proclaimed, “I have a live eye,” and the exhibition illuminates the influence of his vision, tastes, and efforts on the Museum’s collecting, exhibition, and publication history.

Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern features more than 200 works from the Museum’s collection—set and costume designs for the ballet by Paul Cadmus and Jared French, photographs by Walker Evans and George Platt Lynes, realist and magic realist paintings by Honoré Sharrer and Pavel Tchelitchew, sculpture by Elie Nadelman and Gaston Lachaise, and the Latin American art that Kirstein acquired for the Museum by artists such as Antonio Berni and Raquel Forner—alongside material drawn from the Museum Archives.

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