The exhibition Déjà Vu? Revealing Repetition in French Masterpieces at the Walters Art Museum challenges many of the assumptions that both scholars and the general public have about the importance of the original in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French art. Beginning with Jacques-Louis David and ending with Henri Matisse, the exhibition investigates the variety of ways that artists engaged in the act of replicating their works of art. From studio copies, to prints for commercial distribution, to variations on a theme, numerous types of repetition are brought to the fore in order to unsettle convictions about originality. In so doing, the exhibition reveals the extent to which repetition was both an accepted fact of nineteenth-century art and, as it became the predominant means of production in early twentieth-century modernism, the driving force behind contemporary anxiety over questions of originality and authenticity. Exhibition curator Eik Kahng, Curator of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Art at the Walters Art Museum, has made use of what some would consider the lesser important works in the museum’s collection—such as copies and replicas of master works—to build a smart, challenging exhibition that offers innovative scholarship on major concerns of the academic world and useful new conservation research...