This month, London audiences will have a mouthwatering encounter with a Modern master whose impact on contemporary art has been enormous. But the venue is not Tate Modern. It is the Royal Ballet and Opera, which hosts Three Signature Works, a trio of pieces by George Balanchine, sublime choreographer of the Modern era: Prodigal Son, first performed in 1929, Serenade (1935) and Symphony in C (1947).

Balanchine pioneered “neoclassical” ballet, so-called because it uses traditional techniques for radical new choreography. His career is startling in the eras that it straddled, the modernities it witnessed and shaped, and the avant-garde protagonists who populate it.

Born Georgi Melitonovitch Balanchivadze in St Petersburg in 1904 (he died in 1983), by 21 he was working with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, revising Léonide Massine’s 1920 choreography of Stravinsky’s Le Chant du Rossignol, with Henri Matisse’s original costumes and sets. He never looked back.

Landmark trio

The three works being performed in London are all landmarks. In 1929, The Prodigal Son premièred as the final Ballets Russes ballet, as Diaghilev died later that year. The sets and costumes were designed by the French painter Georges Rouault, a sometime Fauve obsessed with religious iconography. Artist and choreographer found a particular symbiosis in their fascination with the clarity and simplicity of a historic form: “In designing the choreography,” Balanchine said, “I had in mind the Byzantine icons that are so familiar to all Russians.” Rouault’s designs will be revived for the Royal Ballet performance.

Serenade was the first ballet Balanchine choreographed in the US. Created on students at the School of American Ballet (and, radically, including mistakes and chance moments), it is central to the repertoire of the New York City Ballet (NYCB), which Balanchine co-founded in 1948. Its artistic history, with designs by the minor artist Gaston Longchamp, is perhaps less distinguished. But Symphony in C’s original production (then called Le Palais de Cristal) involved a major artist from the outset, with designs by the Surrealist Leonor Fini. Her costumes, themed around the colours of gemstones, eventually also informed new Balanchine choreography; a 1967 piece, Jewels.

Generations of influence

In the US, Balanchine both influenced and prompted more irreverent reaction among successive generations of choreographers, like Yvonne Rainer and Merce Cunningham, and their wider artistic milieux. That he incorporated Summerspace, the great 1958 Cunningham collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg, into the NYCB repertoire, is telling of his appreciation of his followers.

But Balanchine’s relevance to visual art is not just in direct collaborations and affiliations with artists in his lifetime. His formal gestures and patterns make him crucial to certain strains of contemporary performance art. Key to the choreographic ground that he broke was its plotlessness. “A ballet may contain a story, but the visual spectacle, not the story, is the essential element,” he said, adding: “The choreographer and the dancer must remember that they reach the audience through the eye—and the audience, in its turn, must train itself to see what is performed upon the stage.”

So he both insisted on an abstract visual urgency while empowering his audience—a profoundly contemporary ideal. And art has moved steadily towards Balanchine’s discipline over recent decades, dissolving boundaries between performance and sculpture, gallery and stage. The artists Tino Sehgal and Pablo Bronstein, for instance, have used Balanchine’s movements within performative collages in gallery settings. Sehgal incorporated Balanchine’s steps within his early work 20 Minutes for the 20th Century (1999), a “museum of dance”, as he described it. Bronstein incorporated Balanchine’s movements into pieces for the Performa Biennial in 2007 and the Duveen Commission at Tate Britain in 2016, in which he riffed on dance’s relationship to architecture.

These reflect a preoccupation with museums as spaces activated by bodies, more than merely as displays of objects. In 2015, the art historian Dorothea von Hantelmann argued that “in the canon of the 21st century”—one of “a history of bodily postures and forms of embodiment”—Balanchine will be “as important as Malevich”. As artists grapple with this idea and challenge and reinvent the museum, the balance of grace and economy in Balanchine’s choreography, and its own engagement with cultural traditions, offers an irresistible eloquence.

• The Royal Ballet presents Balanchine: Three Signature Works as part of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels, 12 March-8 April, www.dancereflections-vancleefarpels.com