The Art of Suicide

More desperate pursuits are illustrated in The Art of Suicide, a scholarly look at the depiction of self-murder in painting and other visual forms, from Rembrandt's Lucretia to the tawdry engravings in Victorian England's Illustrated Police News to the more abstract representations by Man Ray and Warhol. Studying the Didos and Judases and Ophelias depicted over the last two millennia, Ron M. Brown, a teaching fellow in the Faculty of Health and Environment at Leeds University in Britain, analyzes the competing cultural perceptions of, and moral questions regarding, suicide in the Western world, from the heroic suicides of antiquity to the 20th century's clinical cases. (Mar. 25)