BRIEFLY NOTED.(Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun, Eero Saarinen, Captured: A Film/Video History of the Lower East Side and Fresh Fruits)(Book Review)

Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun, by Gita May (Yale; $30). Vigee Le Brun became a famous portraitist while still in her twenties, and was a favorite of Marie-Antoinette. May's biography seeks to rescue her from critics who have dismissed her as an operator and a superficial talent. Born in 1755, Vigee Le Brun lived until the eighteen-forties and produced two volumes of memoirs, which form the backbone of this account. Occasionally, one feels the lack of broader perspectives, and May, a literature professor, fails to give a detailed sense of either the historical context or the aesthetic content of her subject's works. Still, she effectively conveys that, for Vigee Le Brun, matters such as politics, friendship, and love were subordinate to an absolute focus on honing her skill. Even post-Revolution exile was turned to advantage; she traversed Europe looking at masterpieces and painting such subjects as Byron and the family of Catherine the Great.

Eero Saarinen, by Jayne Merkel (Phaidon; $75). In 1956, when Saarinen made the cover of Time, he was America's most renowned architect. His sculptural modernism--evident in such commissions as the T.W.A. terminal at Kennedy Airport, the CBS building, and the St. Louis Arch--was in perfect accord with the country's postwar mood. He trained at the school founded by his father, the celebrated Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, and established important relationships there with his future collaborators Charles and Ray Eames. An indefatigable worker, he oversaw more than forty staff architects at the height of his practice, and created in detail hundreds of possible designs for each project. After his death, in 1961, his work fell into critical neglect. Merkel's handsome volume presents the first truly comprehensive survey, and seeks to demonstrate how Saarinen could be "mainstream and avant-garde at the same ...