New York City Ballet’s “Jerome Robbins: An American Icon,” which bowed Sunday, was constructed entirely of late ballets that are not his finest. Robbins joined NYCB in 1949 after successes in ballet and on Broadway. He left the company in 1957 after the polio-induced paralysis of Tanaquil Le Clercq, one of his principal muses at NYCB, and returned in 1969, working in the company until his death in 1998.

After his return to NYCB, Robbins’s work was increasingly neoclassical, at the expense of some of his own popular-theater authenticity. “2 & 3 Part Inventions,” which opened the current Robbins program, was the last in a series of ballets to magnificent piano music that began with his 1969 NYCB comeback piece, “Dances at a Gathering.” These works were often enormously long and protracted. “2 & 3 Part Inventions,” performed to Bach, is much shorter, although although it, too, sometimes substitutes mere ingenuity for actual invention.

Robbins likes his dancers to identify themselves as “dancers,” and the dancers in “2 & 3” begin the ballet by arriving on stage and greeting the audience with a bow. What follows are a series of duets, solos, and trios that are playful, juvenile, usually high-spirited, and sometimes amorous and reflective. Then the dancers star bowing their way off the stage, until only one is left remaining. Then the curtain falls, and they bow in earnest.

Robbins was a fierce custodian of his own work, and he has an active and vigilant estate. NYCB’s performances of his works are always polished. Here the dancers were Rebecca Krohn, Tyler Angle, Sterling Hyltin, Jonathan Stafford, Tiler Peck, Amar Ramasar, Ana Sophia Scheller, and Seth Orza. They understood the work, and performed with skill and charm.

Then came “A Suite of Dances,” originally choreographed for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak dance company in 1994. In 1976, Robbins had made “Other Dances,” set to Chopin, for Mr. Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova, and in “A Suite of Dances,” Robbins revisits and expands some of the comic tropes he’d invented for Baryshnikov nearly 20 years earlier. Much of this piece can be seen coming a mile away. Damian Woetzel — increasingly charismatic and theatrically savvy in recent years — was able to banish the invisible presence of Mr. Baryshnikov even as he went through a catalogue of impish mannerisms that were trademark Baryshnikov.

Robbins’s “In Memory of … ” — led on Sunday by Wendy Whelan, Charles Askegard, and Seth Orza — was created in 1985 to a score by Alban Berg that Balanchine had wanted to use 20 years earlier. “In Memory of … ” follows the program outlined by Alban Berg when he composed the music, which was inspired by the death of an 18-year-old girl, the daughter of a friend.

The girl, danced here by Ms. Whelan, is first seen frolicking happily with a boy, danced by Mr. Orza, before being claimed by a death figure played by Charles Askegard, and finally escorted to heaven by both men. Along the way, there are tributes to Tudor’s “Pillar of Fire,” and Balanchine’s “Serenade.” The leads did what they could with it, and the ensemble was great, but death and transfiguration are not really Robbins’s territory.

The program closed with “I’m Old Fashioned,” a modestly successful exercise in marketing and showmanship. There’s a screen onstage when the curtain goes up, and soon we are watching Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth dancing to Kern’s eponymous tune in an excerpt from the 1942 film “You Were Never Lovelier.” Then the screen rises and the ballet dancers take over; in the finale, live and cinematic protagonists dance in tandem.

“I’m Old Fashioned” was created during the final months of Balanchine’s life, in 1983, a desperate time for NYCB, and Robbins in this ballet sometimes seems to be running out of steam. “I’m Old Fashioned” is a smooth blend of ballet and ballroom, but not an inspired synthesis, and the ballet recycles familiar tropes and genre situations.

At the Sunday matinee, the three couples were Tyler Angle and Rebecca Krohn, Maria Kowroski and Philip Neal, and Jenifer Ringer partnered by Stephen Hanna. All were excellent, and Ms. Kowroski gave full play to her half-pixie-half-debutante wit. But even though the ballet dancers’ performances are different and considerably more balletic from the onscreen performers, their choreography is enough of an homage to stimulate invidious comparisons.