In 1943, Lincoln Kirstein was inducted into the Army and sent for training to Fort Belvoir, near Washington, D.C. After months of target practice and KP, Kirstein’s restless enthusiasm and irresistible compulsion to organize, left him ready to boil over. So he found an excuse to do what he did best. Why not, he wondered, put together an exhibition of art by the soldiers at Fort Belvoir? As long as he was at it, why not put together a survey of soldiers’ art throughout American history, complete with a museum show and a book? He wrote proposals, he chatted up officers, he rummaged through the archives at West Point and the Library of Congress. By the time Kirstein shipped out for Europe, American battle art was the subject of a color spread in Life magazine.

For most privates in the U.S. Army —even for most impresarios — this would have been enough of a contribution to the war effort. For Kirstein, it was little more than a way to stave off boredom. By the time he was drafted, age 35, his place in the history of American culture was secure. As a student at Harvard, he had founded Hound and Horn, a little magazine that became a laboratory of American modernism, publishing writers like Allen Tate and Yvor Winters. At the same time, he organized the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, which helped introduce Boston to Oskar Kokoschka, Diego Rivera, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Many of the society’s shows would travel to the newly founded Museum of Modern Art. It’s no wonder his grades weren’t very good: While other undergraduates were studying art history, Kirstein was making it.

Yet even these achievements get comparatively little space in “The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein” (Knopf, 725 pages, $37.50), the giant new biography by Martin Duberman. Mr. Duberman, a history professor at the City University of New York and a biographer whose previous subjects range from James Russell Lowell to Paul Robeson, has enough to do just putting down the details of Kirstein’s dervish-like activity. By page 75, he has already left Boston behind, and plunged into a New York teetering on the edge of the Depression. Kirstein came to the city in 1929, and didn’t permanently leave it until his death in 1996. Long before then, he had joined the small company of men and women who, usually from behind the scenes, made New York the capital of the American century.

But like those other builders — one thinks of William Shawn and Alfred Barr — Kirstein’s effectiveness depended on effacing his own personality. His volatility and kindness, his bad temper and good nature, made a tremendous impression on those who knew him — and everyone in the arts did, at least slightly — but he left behind no great work to carry that impression down to posterity. There already has arisen in New York a new generation that doesn’t know Kirstein. For them — for us — Mr. Duberman’s biography is invaluable, filling in the secret history of a city that is in some part Kirstein’s creation.

At the same time, even Mr. Duberman, whose research is exhaustive and sometimes exhausting, doesn’t quite succeed in communicating the fascination of Kirstein’s personality. Precisely because he was not an artist, his quandaries and passions — about politics, mysticism, friendship, sex — never received any objective expression that might raise them above the personal. Mr. Duberman suggests on several occasions that Kirstein’s chaotic inner life makes him a man for our time, a “postmodern” personality built on improvisation. This is flattering but unconvincing. To be confused about love and art and God, as Kirstein was, requires no special gift. It is messily ordinary, and one reason we turn to art, and read about artists’ lives, is the promise of elevation to a more ordered and meaningful plane.

While Mr. Duberman’s biography is regularly interrupted by bulletins about Kirstein’s private life, then, these cannot be the heart of the book. We learn which dancers Kirstein fell in love with (he was regularly entranced by the men of New York City Ballet, just as George Balanchine was by the women), and how far to the left he was pulled by compassion and peer pressure (never quite as far as Mr. Duberman would like). But it is hard to take too seriously the spiritual travails of a man whose religious vocabulary was provided by G.I. Gurdjieff, the high-society charlatan whose philosophy of self-actualization pleasingly echoed back the egotism of his rich, artsy disciples.

No, it is not what Kirstein thought and felt that we care about today; it is what he built that matters. The turmoil of his inner life is significant only because it fueled the compulsive activity that never let him be happy unless he was moving mountains. His most important creations, of course, came in the world of dance. When he arrived in New York, the city was a ballet desert. There were tours by the surviving fragments of the Ballets Russes, and there were the modern-dance creations of Martha Graham and Agnes de Mille, but there was no permanent institution devoted to classical dance.

Kirstein, who had fallen in love with the ballet as a teenager, resolved to change that. It was a quixotic ambition for a man who was neither a dancer nor a choreographer. (By the time Kirstein attended his first dance class, he was 25; to cover his embarrassment, he told the other students that he was there as a reporter from The New York Sun.) And while Kirstein was a wealthy man — his father had made a fortune as a partner in the Filene’s department store chain — he was nowhere near rich enough to sustain the heavy losses involved in starting a dance troupe.

The heart of Mr. Duberman’s biography is the story of how Kirstein breathed life into the School of American Ballet and New York City Ballet, against very long odds. He raised money, organized tours, recruited students; when necessary he sewed costumes. Most important of all, in 1933, he brought Balanchine to America to be the presiding genius of the school and later the company. It is strange, and a little sad, to learn from Mr. Duberman how remote their relationship remained, especially once the first, difficult years were over. Kirstein’s name is permanently linked with Balanchine’s, as Sergei Diaghilev’s was with Vaslav Nijinsky; but it seems that the two men had little to say to one another. The fate of the impresario, perhaps, is to be always a little left out, a little resented, a little despised.

Yet whatever Kirstein suffered — and Mr. Duberman shows that he was grieved by the world’s failure to take his poems and novels seriously — he was seldom jealous of his more famous collaborators, and he never stopped building. Besides his achievements in the dance world, Kirstein helped in various ways, official and subterranean, to shape MoMA and Lincoln Center (which Ed Koch joked, at a birthday tribute, was really named after him). He was largely responsible for the success of the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Conn.

Kirstein was with Walker Evans when he took his early photographs of New England houses, and helped to arrange the solo show at MoMA that made Evans’s name. He toured Latin America and brought back the news about David Alfaro Siqueiros. He visited Japan, fell in love with Noh and Kabuki theater, and immediately arranged for a company to tour America. Kirstein’s face could even be seen, briefly, in the mural that Diego Rivera painted for Rockefeller Center, and which Nelson Rockefeller’s family made him destroy because the mural included Lenin. For Kirstein, who spent his life mediating between artists and plutocrats, that erasure must have felt especially ironical, and monitory. Fortunately, thanks to Mr. Duberman’s devoted biography, he has been spared a second oblivion.

akirsch@nysun.com