Lincoln Kirstein - Friendships and Personal Life

Friendships and Personal Life

Kirstein's eclectic interests, ambition and keen interest in high culture, funded by independent means, drew a large circle of friends who stimulated creativity in many of the arts. These included: Glenway Wescott, Monroe Wheeler, George Platt Lynes, Jared French, Bernard Perlin, Pavel Tchelitchev, Katherine Anne Porter, Barbara Harrison, Gertrude Stein, Jensen Yow, Jonathan Tichenor, Donald Windham, Cecil Beaton, Jean Cocteau, W. H. Auden, George Tooker, Margaret French Cresson, Walker Evans, Sergei Eisenstein and more.

Kirstein kept diaries beginning in summer camp in 1919 until the late 1930s, and Martin Duberman's 2007 biography The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein makes use of them and numerous letters. Kirstein enjoyed sex with men—Harvard undergraduates, sailors, street boys, casual encounters in the showers at the 63rd St YMCA. Longer affairs are described with dancer Pete Martinez, artist Dan Maloney, and conservator Jensen Yow among others, as well as relationships that were physically unrealized. Casual sex frequently grew into long-term friendship.

He also slept with women and in 1941 married Fidelma Cadmus, the sister of the artist Paul Cadmus. He and his wife enjoyed an amicable if not stressful relationship until her death in 1991. Some of his boyfriends lived with them in their East 19th Street house; "Fidelma was enormously fond of most of them." The New York art world considered his bisexuality an "open secret," although he did not publicly acknowledge his sexual orientation until 1982.

Kirstein was the primary patron of Fidelma's brother, the artist Paul Cadmus, buying many of his paintings and subsidizing his living expenses. Cadmus had difficulty selling his work through galleries because of the erotically charged depictions of working and middle class men, which provoked controversy.

In his later years, Kirstein struggled with bipolar disorder- mania, depression, and paranoia. He destroyed the studio of friend Dan Maloney, and sometimes was in a straitjacket for weeks at a psychiatric hospital. His illness did not generally affect his professional creativity until the end of his life.