“To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim,” Oscar Wilde proclaims, in the preface to his novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Early in that story, the character Basil Hallward, the painter of the titular picture, echoes this sentiment when explaining why he will never exhibit it. “There is too much of myself in the thing,” he laments. “We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.”

If the reader accepts this premise, it follows that it should not be assumed to represent Wilde’s actual belief. Yet it is difficult not to identify this particular author with his creations. Like Wilde, Basil possesses an idealistic devotion to beauty and love that proves his undoing. His libertine friend Lord Henry Wotton’s devil-may-care wisecracks (“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances”) contain the cutting and at times caustic wit for which Wilde was—and remains—famous. And the angelic youth Dorian Gray’s deadly descent into vanity and vice—ignited by a hubristic obsession with his own image—eerily foreshadows the grim trajectory of Wilde’s later years. Though Wilde’s proposition of a pure art, separate from and greater than the artist, may convey an earnest wish, it is ultimately ironic: “The Picture of Dorian Gray” is a self-portrait.

The entwinement of Wilde’s work and his life provides the conceptual basis for the ballet “Oscar,” choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon for the Australian Ballet and currently on at New York City Center. “Oscar” dramatizes the period of Wilde’s imprisonment, from 1895 to 1897, after he was convicted of “gross indecency”—a criminal charge brought against him by the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred (Bosie) Douglas. In 1895, the Marquess publicly accused Wilde—by then an international celebrity—of sodomy, leading Wilde to prosecute him on the ground of libel. In return, the Marquess sought and, eventually, supplied proof of Wilde’s engagement in homosexual activity. (Wilde was married and had two children, but also had liaisons with men, most notably Robbie Ross—his first male lover, who would become a lifelong friend—and Bosie.) Found guilty, Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor, during which he suffered profoundly. On the evening of his release, he sailed for France, where he remained, impoverished and alcoholic, until his death, in 1900.

Wheeldon braids this sad and sordid episode with renditions of two of Wilde’s stories: “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and “The Nightingale and the Rose,” a tragic fable involving the futile sacrifice of art for what turns out to be false love. Trapped in his cell—represented by a small, starkly lit platform bearing just a cot and a door—Wilde recalls happier times: idyllic afternoons with his family, his success in society, the frisson of meeting Ross. These rosy reveries gradually darken as Wilde remembers succumbing to hedonism, deceit, debt, and disgrace. He is haunted throughout by figures from his own fictions, chiefly the Nightingale and Dorian, who serve as distorted manifestations of Wilde’s best and worst impulses; his visions culminate in a feverish phantasmagoria that shows the transformation of desire into downfall.

Wheeldon is no stranger to narrative dance, having mounted adaptations of “Like Water for Chocolate,” “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” and “The Winter’s Tale.” A former N.Y.C.B. dancer himself, Wheeldon has won Tony Awards for his work on Broadway productions, including, most recently, “MJ the Musical,” based on the career of Michael Jackson. But “Oscar” is a structurally ambitious undertaking, and it struggles to balance an abundance of events with emotional depth. “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and Wilde’s real-life ruinous affair with Bosie each offer ample material for dramatic exploration; here, the former receives a rather rushed and occasionally muddled treatment in the second act (including one scene that amounts to a play within a dream within the ballet’s frame narrative), and the latter is largely reduced to a passionate pas de deux between the two men. This pas de deux, which climaxes with a kiss, is an admirable and affecting set piece in a dance world still dominated by the narrative conventions of heterosexual romance—“Oscar” is among the first full-length story ballets, if not the first, to center on romantic relationships between men—but it is not quite fluid or fresh enough to achieve the sublimity for which it seems to strive. The two dancers’ cartwheeling lifts—feet in the air, head toward the ground—are more athletic than erotic, creating pretty lines but lacking in urgency. As a whole, the ballet’s arc can feel unfocussed, arhythmic—some parts overstuffed with action, others failing to fill with expressive movement Joby Talbot’s lavish score.

Perhaps the project’s central challenge lies in its very medium. Wilde’s prodigious gift was his use of language, but dance is traditionally a nonverbal art. Tellingly, “Oscar” deploys a narrator (the actor Seán O’Shea) to relate the details of Wilde’s trial. Pantomime is a staple of classical ballet, but it’s striking how often the dancers in “Oscar” imitate the acts of speaking and writing. Wheeldon’s choreographic idiom is well matched to his subject—his penchant for playful flourishes and unexpected shapes complements the irreverence and barbed humor of Wilde’s proto-modernism—and “Oscar” is at its strongest when dancers, released from the pressures of ferrying along a plotline, are allowed to inhabit their characters’ joy, yearning, grief, madness. Grace Carroll gives a poignant performance as the Nightingale—borne aloft with arched back and trembling, outstretched hands by other dancers, who play thorns that pierce her breast—and Adam Elmes makes a seductively sinister Dorian Gray. Elijah Trevitt captures Bosie’s elegance and impetuousness, and Callum Linnane both the effervescence of Wilde at his peak and the pathos of his decline.

In blending the œuvre and the personal experiences of its subject, “Oscar” joins other literary bio-ballets that take the same approach: Wayne McGregor’s “Woolf Works,” inspired by Virginia Woolf, and Maurice Béjart’s “M,” about Yukio Mishima. Contending that a writer’s life can help illuminate audiences’ understanding of their work, and vice versa, the genre suggests an unsettled and unsettling question about the relationship between the art and the artist, the enduring and the ephemeral. The fantasy that a true masterpiece outlasts, exceeds, and even eclipses its creator carries within it the promise of immortality, but also holds an element of the memento mori; there is a reluctance to separate even the most indelible art from the all-too-human life of which it is evidence. Toward the end of “Oscar,” the Nightingale appears in Wilde’s cell, raising a red rose, symbolic of the work that will survive. Yet the ballet closes with a sonnet composed not by Wilde but by Bosie, recited by the narrator—a bittersweet reminder that after we are gone, whatever we set down ourselves, our legacies are tended by others, our stories told, if told at all, in words not our own. ♦