Arlene Croce, who died last week at 90, made dance as important in arts criticism as painting, music, theater and books. The New Yorker’s dance critic from 1973 to 1996, Croce amassed a cult following and not a few detractors. She was also, despite insular origins, one of the most daring and stylish critics in the American canon.

In the 1970s, a dance boom hit New York City, and The New Yorkercreated its first-ever dance critic slot, filling it with a 40-year-old editor and film critic plucked from small-magazine obscurity: Croce.

But Croce wasn’t created by the dance boom. She created herself, through a stubborn, private, almost secret ambition, and a sort of homemade feminism that morphed into an Olympian credo about art. She believed in beauty. And she believed that a mix of virtuosity and classicism — she loved that word — lifted you out of the reach of messy human emotions.

She was born into a large, extended Italian American working-class family in Providence, R.I., that rose to the middle class as her father, a textile mill manager, followed the industry to North Carolina. While displaced, the Croces retained their rituals (stuffed shells for special occasions) and wry speech rhythms, which Arlene absorbed even as she ventured beyond the family.

Her first epiphany, she told me once, came from an after-school program that took children to the movies to watch Disney cartoons. She noticed that the college-age chaperones reacted differently from the kids: They weren’t just laughing, they were analyzing.

Other epiphanies followed. Just out of Barnard, she was physiologically shaken, she said in a 1979 interview in Vogue, by the premiere of George Balanchine’s “Agon” in 1957. She was similarly moved by a retrospective of the 1930s Astaire-Rogers films at the Museum of Modern Art.

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