Making an American Ballet Institution in the Cultural Cold War in Europe

Abstract

Chapter 4 examines the circumstances leading to the final success of Lincoln Kirstein’s American ballet in 1963, when Ford Foundation philanthropy made George Balanchine’s neoclassicism a national institution and a national style. Examining the New York City Ballet’s cultural diplomacy activities, it illustrates the advantageous position that Balanchine attained within the alliances between the government, private and corporate foundations, and the arts that developed in the cultural Cold War. Yet the chapter stresses the complexity of the collaboration between the ballet company and the government, insisting that the artists often had very different political motivations than the state. A main concern is how the belief in the social efficacy of art, nurtured in the 1930s, was affected by the transformational shift in arts funding, organization, and management that arose during the Cold War. This chapter concludes by raising questions about the consequences of the post-WWII institutionalization of the arts for the political agendas of the 1930s-era modernists.