Lincoln Kirstein, a co-founder of the New York City Ballet and a visionary who never wavered in his belief that ballet could flourish in America, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.

A poet, novelist, historian, art collector and critic, the erudite Mr. Kirstein was an expert in many fields. But it was as a ballet director that he made his greatest contributions to American culture.

The New York City Ballet, which received its name in 1948, was the outgrowth of an experimental group called Ballet Society, founded in 1946 by Mr. Kirstein and the choreographer George Balanchine. It rapidly established itself as a major company with its own distinctive style. Anna Kisselgoff, the chief dance critic of The New York Times, once described Mr. Kirstein as "the man who brought you all those wonderful Neo-Classic plotless masterpieces by George Balanchine to the music of everyone from Bach to Stravinsky," and she proclaimed him "the chief propagandist for a new American classicism in ballet."

Mr. Kirstein prized continuity in the development of the arts, and the continuity of ballet as a constantly evolving art gave it special appeal to him. The present New York City Ballet evolved from projects begun by Mr. Kirstein as far back as the 1930's.

In working toward his goals, he was guided by several fundamental principles. He wrote in a 1959 monograph called "What Ballet Is All About": "Our Western ballet is a clear if complex blending of human anatomy, solid geometry and acrobatics offered as a symbolic demonstration of manners -- the morality of consideration for one human being moving in time with another."

The basis for innovation in his company was established tradition rather than an amorphous form of self-expression. Nevertheless, he preferred the production of new works in the classical manner to revivals of old favorites from the 19th-century repertory. And although the New York City Ballet developed many stars of its own, it never promoted a star system and always emphasized choreographic excellence over glamour.

Peter Martins, artistic director of the New York City Ballet, paid tribute to Mr. Kirstein yesterday in a statement that said in part: "Like Balanchine, he informed, inspired, guided and enriched not only the lives of every member of New York City Ballet, but the lives of many generations. We have lost a founder, a father, a friend."

Mr. Kirstein was also a co-founder, in 1934, of the School of American Ballet, which is now the New York City Ballet's affiliated school. Aided by grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the school somewhat resembles the state-financed ballet academies in Britain and Russia, as well as the legendary St. Petersburg Imperial School of Ballet of prerevolutionary Russia, of which Balanchine was a graduate.

Although ballet remained his greatest passion, Mr. Kirstein was remarkably versatile. His artistic philanthropies were many, though usually unpublicized, and he wrote extensively about politics, history, literature, drama, music, film, photography, architecture, sculpture, painting and drawing. The poet W. H. Auden praised "Rhymes and More Rhymes of a Pfc.," a book of poems Mr. Kirstein published in 1965, as "the most convincing, moving and impressive" book he had read about World War II.

In "Quarry," a memoir published in 1986, Mr. Kirstein indicated that he was fascinated by cats, museumgoing, Asian and African art, Abraham Lincoln and portraits of William Shakespeare and of himself. He produced "The Play of Daniel" in 1958, in the modern performing edition prepared by the Rev. Rembert Weakland; as performed by the New York Pro Musica in the Cloisters and New York City churches, this revival of a 12th-century play became so popular that it was staged annually for two decades.

An admirer of the traditional arts of Japan, Mr. Kirstein helped arrange a 1959 American tour for Gagaku, an all-male troupe that is the Japanese Imperial Household Musicians and Dancers. Gagaku has rarely performed outside the Imperial Music Pavilion in Tokyo and some of the great Japanese shrines.

Mr. Kirstein also was one of several teachers of a special course for advanced students in directing and theater administration at the Yale Drama School in 1977. He was the author of "White House Happening," a play about Lincoln's assassination that was produced at Harvard in 1967. He contributed the text to the book "Lay This Laurel," a photographic tribute to the Civil War sculpture of Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The book was one of the inspirations for the film "Glory," about the first black regiment to fight in the Union Army during the Civil War.

Mr. Kirstein was born on May 4, 1907, in Rochester, the son of Louis E. Kirstein and the former Rose Stein. But he was reared in Boston, where his father became the chief executive of Filene's, the department store. His cultivated, affluent parents encouraged their son's interest in the arts. But Mr. Kirstein never forgot that when he was 9 years old, Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes performed in Boston and despite his insistent requests, his parents forbade him to see the company because they thought him too young.

He received a bachelor's degree from Harvard College, and while there he was a founder of the prestigious literary magazine Hound and Horn. Despite coming from a respectable family, the young Mr. Kirstein was fascinated by the raffish and vaguely criminal world of Prohibition. Describing the habitues of 1920's speak-easies, he recalled in 1986: "It was very much like the aristocratic world of Boston, only it was on a different level. It was traditional -- except that these people were all disinherited."

During his college days, Mr. Kirstein caught what he liked to call "balletptomaine." He spent summers traveling abroad, watching ballet productions, especially those by the Diaghilev company, in many European capitals. He was particularly impressed by the works of Diaghilev's youngest choreographic discovery, George Balanchine. It was Balanchine's "Apollo" that truly awakened him to the potential of classical ballet; the work also seemed to embody ideas set forth by T. S. Eliot in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," in which the poet and critic argues that tradition must always be the basis for artistic innovation.

Typically, Mr. Kirstein wrote, again in "What Ballet Is All About," "True originality refocuses the attentive eye, not alone on a new ballet, but after this has become domesticated, extending the whole language of moving on stage."

While sightseeing in Venice in 1929, Mr. Kirstein wandered into a church and discovered a funeral service in progress. Standing quietly at the back and glancing around him, he found that many of the mourners looked vaguely familiar but he could not place them. It was only later that he learned that he had unwittingly attended Diaghilev's funeral and that those mourners were Diaghilev's dancers. The incident, which he also described in his novel, "Flesh Is Heir," published in 1932, impressed him as an omen. Ballet, he increasingly felt, was to be his destiny.

Mr. Kirstein entered the ballet world professionally in 1933 when he persuaded Balanchine, who was out of work at that time, to come to the United States and found a ballet school and company. The results of that invitation were the School of American Ballet and a company, the American Ballet, which made its debut in 1935. That same year, Mr. Kirstein published "Dance: A Short History of Classic Theatrical Dancing," which remains a standard reference.

Although using classical technique, many of Balanchine's ballets were considered obscure and experimental in the 30's, and the American Ballet received both favorable and strongly unfavorable reviews. From 1935 to 1938 it was the resident ballet company for the Metropolitan Opera, and some of the dance sequences Balanchine choreographed for operatic productions mystified conservative music lovers.

The American Ballet toured South America in 1941, then disbanded. Mr. Kirstein also directed Ballet Caravan, an offshoot of the American Ballet established in 1936 to encourage young American choreographers. Among the notable productions it offered until it was disbanded along with the American Ballet were Lew Christensen's "Filling Station" and Eugene Loring's "Billy the Kid."

In 1941 Mr. Kirstein married Fidelma Cadmus, the sister of the painter Paul Cadmus; she died in 1991. Mr. Kirstein joined the Army in 1943 and served in Europe. A year later, as a result of a growing fascination with military art, he published "American Battle Painting: 1776-1918." After World War II, he went overseas with the Arts, Monuments and Archives Section of the Third Army, using his cultural expertise to trace and recover artworks stolen and hidden by the Nazis.

Upon his return to civilian life, he founded a new company, Ballet Society, in 1946, again with Balanchine as principal choreographer. At first, this group performed experimental productions for subscription audiences only. With its success, it also offered evenings for the public at City Center, and in 1948 it was invited to become a resident company at that theater, whereupon it changed its name to the New York City Ballet. The company, which made its first overseas appearances in 1950, soon was regarded as one of the great companies of the world, and in 1964 it moved to its present home, the New York State Theater in Lincoln Center. Mr. Kirstein remained its general director until 1989, when he also retired as president of the School of American Ballet.

Although Mr. Kirstein could be both kindly and witty, he was notoriously cranky in his esthetic theories, and he often relished playing the role of a curmudgeon. Typically, in 1983 he wrote an essay called "Sour Gripes." In his memoir "Quarry" he proclaimed Henri Matisse "a clumsy decorator" and in interviews for a 1986 New Yorker profile he pronounced Edouard Manet "a lousy painter" and the Museum of Modern Art "one of the worst influences in cultural history."

Scornful of much abstract art, Mr. Kirstein persistently praised figurative painters like Paul Cadmus (about whom he wrote a book, "Paul Cadmus," in 1984), George Tooker and Jared French. An admirer of the fantastic imagistic art of Pavel Tchelitchew, Mr. Kirstein was the author of "The Drawings of Pavel Tchelitchew" (1947), and his last book, published in 1994, was "Tchelitchev," a full-scale study that used a variant spelling of the artist's name. He also wrote "Elie Nadelman" (1973), a book about the American sculptor.

Mr. Kirstein's love of ballet did not extend to modern dance, despite the fact that he long admired Martha Graham. She "worried me like a toothache," he confessed in a 1937 essay. But he had little use for many other modern dancers. He castigated modern dance's "aimless emotional vacuity" in a review in 1930, and in another review four years later he deplored its "subhuman and spastic grammar." His most resounding denunciation came in the preface to "Ballet: Bias and Belief," a collection of essays published in 1983, in which he admitted that he now found Graham's genius to be "pernicious heresy and a mindless affront to apostolic legitimacy of traditional method."

The religious imagery was typical of Mr. Kirstein. A large, solemn man who often wore austere black suits, he reminded many people of a clergyman; he was a convert from Judaism to Roman Catholicism and was also deeply influenced by the metaphysical teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff. For Mr. Kirstein, the order of ballet was a secular microcosm of the divine order of creation itself. Thus, in "Ballet: Bias and Belief," he proclaimed that "all order is a reflection of a superior order" and that "all important art is religious art."

Mr. Kirstein's other books include "Ballet Alphabet" (1939), "The Classic Ballet" (1952), "Movement and Metaphor: Four Centuries of Ballet" (1971), "The New York City Ballet" (1973), "Nijinsky Dancing" (1975) and "The Poems of Lincoln Kirstein" (1987). From 1942 to 1948 he edited "Dance Index," America's first scholarly journal devoted to dance history.

Much of Mr. Kirstein's writings revealed little about his personal life. Then in the last decade, he became increasingly and outspokenly autobiographical both in a series of essays published in the literary quarterly Raritan and in several books, which included "Quarry," "By With To and From Lincoln Kirstein" (1991) and "Mosaic," a memoir published in 1994. He frankly reported having homosexual as well as heterosexual affairs, and said that in the early 1930's one of his lovers was Carl Carlsen, a merchant seaman who had been the lover of the poet Hart Crane. Describing a dinner with the English novelist E. M. Forster and Forster's lover, a constable, Mr. Kirstein spoke in "Mosaic" of how at ease he felt with others of what he termed "my true, not my accidental preference, my real blood-tribe."

As a public figure, Mr. Kirstein carried himself with the dignity of the Boston aristocrats whom he praised in 1986 for being "people who had inherited wealth but who were extremely responsible." He received both the United States Government's highest civilian award, the Medal of Freedom, and New York City's highest cultural award, the Handel Medallion. His other awards include the National Medal of Arts, the Brandeis University Notable Achievement Award, the Benjamin Franklin Medal of Britain's Royal Society of Arts, and, with Balanchine, the National Gold Medal of Merit Award of the National Society of Arts and Letters.

No immediate family members survive.

Lincoln E Kirstein