Déjà vu
All Over Again. The Riddle of Otis Kaye’s Masterpiece

edited by James M. Bradburne

The book is devoted to a single painting: D’-jia-vu by Otis Kaye (1885–1974), an artist who was born in Germany but trained in the United States, and was known for his trompe-l’œil works bearing enigmatic and extravagant titles. D’-jia-vu recounts the stock-market crash and the Great Depression between 1929 and 1937, the year of another major financial crisis, and it recreates the Dow Jones index through banknotes, coins, stock certificates, tickertape and small objects. The full name of the index is the Dow Jones Industrial Average, DJIA, an acronym that is taken up by the title of the work. The publication, which accompanies the ‘Art and Illusions. Masterpieces of Trompe-l’œil from Antiquity to the Present Day’ exhibition (Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, 16 October 2009–24 January 2010), is the outcome of an intense conversation among international art and economics experts. It analyses the painting in all of its symbolic references and allusions, examining it in relation to the American scenario of the era. Readers will inevitably discover parallels with our own age and note the great modernity of this work painted in 1937.