In a fairer world, "Portrait of Jason" would have done what her earlier works didn't — it would have launched her, turned her into one of the most sought-out, most admired, and busiest directors of the time.
The few images I have seen suggest a rich and varied visual world: portrait sketches of Kafka, his friends, lovers and family, and narrative scenes that parallel his writing.
Among the offerings are landscapes, detailed renderings of the natural world, portraits and works with allegorical and religious themes.
A Wider World: Portraits in an Adolescence (1986) and Etchings in an Hourglass (1990) were later installments in Simon's autobiography.
There are images from all over the world, portraits of movie stars and politicians, staged fashion photographs and street shots.
Simon's three memoirs, Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood (1982), A Wider World: Portraits in an Adolescence (1986), and Etchings in an Hourglass (1990), won acclaim for their unsentimental evocation of her working-class immigrant Jewish family life.
In its thematic organization, the exhibition, complemented by costume designs, stage sets and photographs, devotes sections to Degas's images of the dancers' private world, portraits of famous ballerinas, classroom lessons, performances onstage and encounters between dancers and their admirers.
Or the elegant portrait of the civil rights pioneer Septima Poinsette Clark that graced the cover of his book, "I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America," and a 1989 exhibition of the same name at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington?
The film is a rapturous tour of the Chauvet cave in southern France, a dramatic pocket of rock that was discovered, in 1994, to contain the oldest known paintings in the history of the world: portraits, up to 32,000 years old, of bison, mammoths, reindeer, lions, bears and woolly rhinoceroses — the improbable megafauna of southern France during the last ice age.
Seven hundred of his art world portraits are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Last year, the Museum of Modern Art acquired seven hundred of his art-world portraits.
