Lincoln Kirstein

Walker Evans

1930–31 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

In his fifty-year career, Walker Evans made very few portraits of his inner circle of friends. Although he was six years his junior, Lincoln Kirstein was Evans’s most important early patron. The collector, philanthropist, and founder of the New York City Ballet sponsored Evans’s 1930-31 trip to photograph Neoclassical architecture in Massachusetts and New England, organized his first exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (1933), and authored the seminal essay in 1938 that accompanied the artist’s first museum monograph, American Photographs. This playful, intimate portrait of Kirstein in the guise of his screen idol James Cagney was among the subject’s favorite images, and he gave it pride of place in his autobiography, Mosaic (1994).

Artist

Walker Evans

Date

1930–31

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2010