Lincoln Kirstein at MoMA
In a portrait photograph at the exhibition Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern, which opens Friday at MoMA and runs through June 15, Walker Evans caught the youthful, undefended eyes of his subject. His head dropping forward, his clouded expression hovering between meditation and sullenness, Lincoln Kirstein was alone with his thoughts. It was 1931 and Kirstein was recently graduated from Harvard. With frontal light casting shadow against the bare wall and throwing shine along the width of his subject’s forehead, Evans looked down from above and across, allowing his lens to take in the complexities of texture: the slight fuzz of crewcut, luxuriant eyebrows, chapped lips, the imperfections of freckles and still-adolescent skin, the deep struggle that was just becoming evident in lines breaking above the brow. Years later, reflecting back on their early encounters, Evans remembered, “I could see he was a brilliant young man.”
For a while, the two were good friends. Close in age (Evans was four years older), both from elite backgrounds and both bisexual, they traveled in some of the same circles. But Evans was, as he put it, ascetic, “since I had a genteel upbringing [I thought] that real life was starvation.” Kirstein, on the other hand, was drawn to the bohemian world, its highs and lows, which included the dives and sailor bars where he could be reckless. He wrote in his diary about some close calls and unexpectedly rough encounters: “my mind is usually conscious of what the body is doing, even urging it away from … an interest in danger that amounts to insanity.” In another series of photographs Evans posed Kirstein as a gangster with a bowler hat and cigarette like James Cagney in Public Enemy, which had recently been in the movie theaters, and then, in a couple of mug shots, as a rogue. “Lincoln, you know he loves all sorts of funny business,” Evans would say later.