"Repetition as a kind of solipsism"

Marcel Duchamp told an interviewer in 1960, “The idea of repeating, for me, is a form of masturbation.” Whether you find his statement contemptuous or commendatory, it speaks to a particularly 20th-century idea of repetition as a kind of solipsism. As “Déjà Vu? Revealing Repetition in French Masterpieces” at the Walters Art Museum underscores, Duchamp’s 19th-century compatriots had no such qualms about revisiting, or even replicating, a subject.