Glimpses of Rock Royals in All Their Moody Majesty

Beck, Kurt (Cobain), Sid (Vicious), Jarvis (Cocker), Liam and Noel (Gallagher)--they’re all favorites of artist Elizabeth Peyton, who perversely uses lush brushwork and vivid color to evoke the rockers’ moody allure.

“Live Forever” (Distributed Art Publishers Inc., 103 pages, $39.95) presents a generous sampler of the paintings in an intimate format, interspersed with adolescent-style drawings of Famous Dead Royals (“Marie Antoinette Choosing Her Clothes”) and assorted not-yet-famous friends.

Peyton, who works from photographs, gives all the musicians pouty red lips and a languid grace that shades into self-conscious awkwardness. Individuated yet somehow all part of the same rock family, these guys seem vulnerable and hungry underneath their cool.

Looking at pop stars through the eyes of the young girls who swoon for them, Peyton seems to be superimposing the adolescents’ naive, open qualities on the media-weary faces of their idols. It’s a tactic that puts a welcome new spin on the celebrity portrait.

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The first thing you see is a full-page photograph of sapphire-blue taffeta pleats, a landscape of undulating light and shadow. This close-up of the artistry that made possible the “Cherie” dinner dress of 1947 is typical of the connoisseur’s approach in “Christian Dior” (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 203 pages, $60).

Dazzling close-up and full-view photos document each triumphant collection of the French designer who remade the stingy-skirted, broad-shouldered women’s clothing of the war years into a luxurious vision of idealized femininity artfully influenced by 19th century styles. A charmed decade of invention stopped only with his death in 1957.

Authors Richard Martin and Harold Koda, whose precise and sophisticated prose admirably suits their topic, explain how Dior devised a pleating method to control the flow from the shaped bodice and tiny waist to the torrent of fabric puffing out at the hip and falling, bell-shaped, to the ankle.

Dior has been criticized for keeping modern women in corsets, but what fashion hound could resist the drop-dead chic of the “Drag” afternoon dress (1948), with its architectural swag of material falling gracefully from a large button on one side? New York socialite Mrs. Byron C. Foy must have been the belle of the ball in 1955 in her strapless burgundy silk “Soiree de New York” evening gown with an angled, all-over pattern of gunmetal beads guaranteeing “a shimmer in every zone.”

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Viewing the world as a mysterious narrative imbued with private sufferings and guarded triumphs, artist Joyce Trieman had the misfortune of falling out of fashion when she was doing her best work. “Joyce Trieman” (Hudson Hills Press, 180 pages, $50), with a generous supply of color plates and serviceable essays by art writers Michael Duncan and Theodore F. Wolff, may find a wider audience for the figurative paintings and drawings she produced during the three decades before her death in 1991 at age 69.

After 1960, when Trieman moved from Chicago to Los Angeles with her businessman husband, her allegorical subject matter yielded to studies of everyday anomie, and her agitated brushwork eventually calmed down into a quietly probing realism. In “The Yellow Lampshade” (1968-69), sparse, vividly colored furnishings in a darkened room frame the palpable tension as a tense-looking man in a suit speaks to a bejeweled woman whose face betrays years of wary victimhood.

Beginning in the ‘70s, Trieman liked to insert unsmiling images of herself--a compact, squarish woman with bright red hair--into enigmatic scenes mingling her contemporaries with famous artists of the past. But her pal in “Thanatopsis,” from 1983--months before she was diagnosed with lung cancer--is none other than a skeleton with whom she chummily relaxes under a huge sky washed with radiant pastel light.

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Violence, extreme emotion and surprising juxtapositions are the lifeblood of photojournalism. “Flash! The Associated Press Covers the World” (Abrams, 208 pages, $39.95) takes viewers on a seven-decade roller-coaster ride of rage, pain, disaster, triumph and telling moments in the lives of famous people.

Founded in 1848 by six New York newspapers to reduce costs by pooling resources, AP added a photographic wing in 1927. The book lacks the historical coherence of chronological order, substituting awkwardly titled chapters: “Leadership,” “Struggle,” “War” and “Moments.” But as individual images--some already burned into our collective memory, others amusingly nostalgic or freshly chilling--the photographs are endlessly fascinating.

In 1935, an uncredited photographer ventured into a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., clearing where a knot of curious people observed the body of a young black man hanging from a tree, the victim of a lynch mob. A similar scene took place in 1976 in Bangkok, where Pulitzer Prize-winner Neal Ulevich caught the moment when a political enemy bashed the dead body of a hanged student protester with a chair, to the fascination of a large crowd.

Among the priceless images in a lighter key are Charles Tasnadi’s shot of then-President Richard M. Nixon consulting his watch while perfunctorily extending his hand to a well-wisher, and Jack Smith’s photo of Tonya Harding’s tragically grimacing face as she blames her skate for a shaky start in the Winter Olympics.

* Cathy Curtis reviews art and photography books every four weeks. Next week: Book reviews by Times readers.