Attitudes.

No, Lincoln Center wasn't named for Lincoln Kirstein, but by rights perhaps it should have been. It would have been a fitting monument to a man who, as much as any other, played a key role in the performing arts in 20th-century America. As the School of American Ballet and New York City Ballet, those two great and enduring institutions he co-founded with George Balanchine, celebrate the centenary of his birth this spring, what he achieved is now largely a matter of public record.

Simply buttressing Balanchine and, less directly, Jerome Robbins, would be enough for any legacy. Yet despite his own studied modesty on the subject, he did much more for dance than simply act as a hardworking enabler of those two grand-masters of NYCB; he had a hand in the larger arts culture of New York City. Unfortunately, he seemed to regard everything in the United States outside New York City as merely the provinces. Paris, London, Tokyo were fine, but Chicago, despite its architecture, was distinctly inferior, and one sometimes wondered if he had even heard of Los Angeles. Yes, it was the parochial view of a snob but also a paradox of greatness. It was one of many contradictions in his public persona.

Kirstein's father was a comfortably wealthy merchant whose money came from running a Boston department store, Filenes. Yet the Harvard-educated, European-traveled Kirstein carefully and painfully reinvented himself as an American aristocrat. He always seemed secretly frightened that he would be discovered as what he and the French called an arriviste. This made him extraordinarily conscious, in many ways, of social standing, contributing to both his snobbery and his inverted snobbery. He would, as he admitted, rather praise a plumber than a sculptor, but could, and on occasion did, swoon over an English duchess.

Another important aspect of Kirstein was that, although he was a secular Jew with High Church tendencies but hardly a religious man in the way that Balanchine was, he had a wonderful sense of the power, value, and influence of religion. As he once observed in a conversation reported in The New Yorker, "All art started from some kind of comprehension of cosmic order which they call religion, one way or another. It's a discipline, and it's made incarnate in ritual. It's incarnate also in painting and architecture and music." He loved ritual, whether it was a Russian Orthodox mass, a performance of Japanese gagaku, or, like Christopher Robin, the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, an event he once told me, only half jokingly, was of more artistic value than The Royal Ballet. He also hated all modern dance, apart from a grudging respect for Martha Graham. But he did like Paul Taylor--as a person.

Kirstein was obviously a man of enormous complexity--partly as the modern archetypal Renaissance polymath. Even as a student at Harvard he helped to found an influential literary magazine, Hound & Horn, and the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, a forerunner of the Museum of Modern Art. He was an art and ballet historian of repute, a stirring polemicist for dance, a half-decent novelist (his Flesh Is Heir can be read with interest today), a very underrated poet (his Rhymes of a PFC is a delight), a playwright and the sponsor of the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre in Connecticut (which he later regretted, believing American actors would never be the match of British), and a man whose dedicated work for City Center and Lincoln Center changed the cultural face of the nation. He was also a man afflicted (is that really the word when applied to a man of genius?) with great emotional and mental problems that were eventually smoothed over by medication. Quixotic and whimsical to acquaintances and enemies and, for all I know, even friends, he was sweetness and light one week, hurling dire insults the next.

Yet he affected many unknown people in many unknown ways. I would not be working in New York were it not for Kirstein. In 1965, without my approval, knowledge, or blessing, he single-handedly engineered my appointment as chief dance critic for The New York Times. Indeed the very first intimation I had of that newspaper's interest in me, other than as a London correspondent, came with a postcard from Lincoln from the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo (it was, of course, Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel) saying only, "When the [obscenity deleted] are you going to take The Times job!!!" A couple of days later the editor of that paper started a telephone barrage leading me finally to an interview and destiny. Of course, after that I insignificantly warred with Lincoln, on and off, for the next 30 years. But he changed my life.

Senior Consulting Editor Clive Barnes also covers dance and theater for the New York Post. He was the chief dance critic of The New York Times from 1965 to 1977.