A bit of heaven in Hartford.

BALLETS Russes to Balanchine: Dance at the Wadsworth Atheneum, a sumptuous display of 80 works of art, 25 costumes, archival material, and photographs--all mounted in tribute to George Balanchine on the occasion of his centennial--runs through January 2, 2005, at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in downtown Hartford, CT. If you love ballet, make the effort to see it.

The show supplies an unparalleled perspective on the dark poetry that characterizes Balanchine's ballets at their most unsettling throughout his career. It offers, too, a unique window on the 1930s collaboration between the choreographer and the self-taught virtuoso draftsman and visionary Pavel Tchelitchew, a relationship that reinforced the streak of lyrical fatalism in Balanchine. Located halfway between Boston and New York, Hartford is more commonly associated with insurance companies than with the unemphatically mystical ballets, infused with elements of tragedy, that Balanchine made in the 1930s: Serenade, Transcendence, Mozartiana. Still, it was at the Atheneum that those works, as well as Balanchine's Alma Mater, possibly the first football ballet, were given their first public American performances, with American dancers, to audiences that included a strong contingent of insurance company honchos.

Hartford's legacy as a Ballet town is almost entirely a product of the educated tastes of Everett "Chick" Austin, Jr., the Atheneum's director between 1927 and 1944. He acquired Old Master works, staged elaborate costume balls attended by the cream of Hartford society, and added the 299-seat Avery Theater, where he produced a number of path-breaking spectacles, beginning with the 1934 world premiere of the Gertrude Stein-Virgil Thomson opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, with staging and choreography by the young Frederick Ashton.

The year before, Austin had the foresight to get the Atheneum to purchase (for a mere $10,000) much of an extensive collection of art associated with the Ballets Russes. Previously owned by Serge Lifar, Diaghilev's last leading male dancer, it consisted of 188 works representing 39 productions over the company's life span, 1909-1929. Inspired by his Harvard friend, Lincoln Kirstein, Austin hoped in 1933 to found at the museum a new school for classical dance, with a ballet company. Both were to be directed by the young Diaghilev alumnus George Balanchine, whose immigration had been subsidized by Austin and Kirstein.

A visionary on a global scale, Balanchine visited Hartford and immediately informed Kirstein that the school and company had to be located in New York. Yet late in 1934, the newly formed Balanchine-Kirstein Producing Company of the School of the American Ballet did return to dance an all-Balanchine evening in the Avery Theater for enthusiastic audiences and to critical acclaim. They were followed at the Avery in subsequent years by Martha Graham and company (with the young Merce Cunningham), Hanya Holm, and Truda Kaschmann (who danced with Alwin Nikolais).

The Lifar collection is only the core of the Atheneum's extensive holdings on dance. Over the past 70 years, though purchase and donation, the museum has continued to acquire dance-related art, photographs, and costumes from both the 19th and 20th centuries. The Ballets Russes to Balanchine show draws on these holdings. One can see, for example, both masterful pastels of dancers by Degas and some of the thousands of sketches that Abraham Walkowitz made of Isadora Duncan throughout her career, as well as Tchelitchew's haunting and exquisitely rendered designs for Balanchine ballets, accompanied by rare performance photographs.

A companion monograph, written by Atheneum staffers Eric Zafran, Eugene R. Gaddis, and Susan Hood, is a treasure of scholarly illumination in itself and, at $15, the Balanchine bargain of the year.