Reading Lincoln Kirstein on the artists he admired is like riding a racehorse from one extreme of Western culture to the other. In fast and fluid prose, his references — which include popular film stars, Hellenic sculpture, and verse by Baudelaire — stream forth with such grace, concision, and force that you feel as if the writer is having difficulty reining himself in.

Kirstein’s enthusiasms and intelligence are evident in the exhibition “Lincoln Kirstein: An Anniversary Celebration” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The show, guest-curated by Jerry Thompson, working with Elisabeth Sussman and Carter Foster, features 40 works by Elie Nadelman, Pavel Tchelitchew, Paul Cadmus, Gaston Lachaise, and Walker Evans, five artists Kirstein supported.

Some of the wall labels for the works include excerpts from Kirstein’s observations about the artists. About Evans, Kirstein wrote: “Evans’s style is based on moral virtues of patience, surgical accuracy, and self-effacement. … The most characteristic single feature of Evans’s work is purity, or even its Puritanism. Every object is regarded head-on with an unsparing frankness of a Russian Icon or Flemish portrait.” Of Nadelman, Kirstein wrote: “He had always loved the circus as the apogee of the performing arts. In America, he found our vaudeville at its sunset glory, just before Hollywood killed it. It was the age of Vernon and Irene Castle, of Florence Walton and Maurice. Nadelman’s ‘Tango’ shows an understanding of theatrical dancing such as no one had had since Seurat and Lautrec: like them, he knew how to extract from the rich gross ore of the music halls the pure ritual entrance and electrifying display.”

As an undergraduate at Harvard, Kirstein (1907–96) founded and edited the literary journal Hound & Horn, which was inspired by T.S. Eliot’s Criterion. Hound & Horn published work by Eliot, William Carlos Williams, André Gide, Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, Herbert Read, and Henry-Russell Hitchcock. The magazine also published photography by Evans and Ralph Steiner, because Kirstein, one of the earliest champions of photography, believed it was equal to painting and sculpture as an art form.

While at Harvard, Kirstein would also form the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art. Opening in 1929, the revolutionary gallery showed works by Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Klee, Kirchner, Kokoschka, Nolde, and Diego Rivera, as well as Japanese and English crafts, creations of the photographers Stieglitz, Evans, Atget, and Edward Weston, and the first exhibition of Calder’s “Circus.”

In 1933, Kirstein first wrote to Chick Austin, the director of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., about the possibility of the museum getting George Balanchine to head an American ballet company and school at the Atheneum. Although that dream was never realized, Balanchine was persuaded to come to America solely because of Kirstein and Austin’s passion for creating a renaissance in the art form. The founding of the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet became the accomplishments for which Kirstein is best known.

And yet Kirstein, a Renaissance man in the true sense of the word, was not only an impresario of the ballet. His intellectual and artistic passions, like his prose, ran far and wide. He wrote seminal essays on artists, a personal memoir, as well as a biography on Nijinsky. And his monographs on Evans and Nadelman are among the most beautifully written and perceptive works of art history written in the 20th century. He practiced ballet and boxing. And many of his enthusiasm and insights, most of which would be taken up almost immediately by innovative institutions such as the Wadsworth Atheneum and the Museum of Modern Art, would shape the way in which Americans, and the world, would come to think about Modern art.

At the Whitney, the breadth and depth of Kirstein, not to mention that of the artists, to whom he devoted tremendous energy, feel truncated. The show feels illustrative and ancillary to the larger series of events commemorating Kirstein around the city, rather than a visual centerpiece. Parts of the exhibit’s weaknesses have to do with its size. Covering only two small galleries, one of which is devoted to the illustrative, homoerotic musings of Paul Cadmus (Kirstein was married to Cadmus’s sister, Fidelma), the works only begin to present us with a portrait of Kirstein’s visual tastes.

Included are a very good bronze nude portrait of Kirstein by Lachaise and three portraits taken of Kirstein by Evans between 1928 and 1931. In one, sporting freckles, he looks like an adolescent. In another, in the style of a mug shot, he comes off as a thug or a convict. Another portrait, a rather academic painting by the set designer Tchelitchew, from 1937, and owned by the sitter, presents us with Kirstein in three guises: A nude boxer and a reclining intellectual flank a larger Kirstein who, young and determined, dressed in a red and black letter jacket, looks like James Dean.

Yet it is not in the portraits that we get to know the visionary behind the scenes. It is in the greatest of the works on view, including Evans’s masterful photographs of people and of architecture (for some of which Kirstein was present during their shooting), thatmake the strongest single statement at the Whitney. Included are the great images “Farmhouse in Westchester County, New York” (1931), “Greek Revival Doorway, New York City” (1934), “South Street New York [Sleeping Man in Doorway]” (1932), and “Havana Citizen” (1933).

The showing of Nadelman, an artist whose reputation Kirstein almost single-handedly revived after Nadelman took his own life in 1946, is somewhat disappointing. There are a handful of masterworks on view at the Whitney — “Tango,” “Dancing Figure” (c. 1916–18), three drawings, and four late plaster figurines. But missing from the show, which includes no portrait busts or papier-mâché, is Nadelman’s full richness and range. The same could be said of Evans, as well as of Tchelitchew. And yet, this show, which gives us a sampling of Kirstein’s passions, still honors him and reminds us of his immeasurable contributions to art.

Until August 26 (945 Madison Ave. at 75th Street, 212-570-3600).