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Once the territory of bohemians such as Pamela Colman Smith – an intimate of William Butler Yeats whose art won the admiration of Alfred Stieglitz – and mystics such as Aleister Crowley (among other things, inventor of his own religion), the tarot has now gone mainstream. Searches for how to do tarot readings skyrocketed during the pandemic, and decks are proliferating at a dizzying pace – your local independent bookstore probably sells at least a dozen of them.
It’s never been easier to get a reading – or at least a quick card pull – and The Morgan Library & Museum’s new show, Tarot!, capitalizes on the practice’s increasing popularity to lure in the curious and knowledgeable alike. Tarot! starts by charting the cards’ evolution from Renaissance Italy up through the 21st century, then offers up the tarot-themed work of more than two dozen artists – among them Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, as well as new art by celebrated British painter Chris Ofili.
According to Claire Gilman, who curated the show’s Modern Visions section, the tarot originated in 15th-century Italy not as a tool for divination, but simply as a card game. It was only as it moved into France in the 18th century that it began to take on occult connotations, and from there it migrated to the UK and eventually began to spread around the globe in the 20th century,
Gilman believes the tarot’s ability to be at once old and new is key to its enduring popularity. “One of the amazing things about the tarot is that there is so much continuity,” she said, “but there is also a tremendous amount of change and transformation. It has these established characters, but there’s also this openness being built into it.”
When the tarot first emerged, long before the advent of mass produced decks, it was only used by those fortunate enough to afford hand-painted collection of the cards, done up by masterful artists in intricate detail. Tarot! offers a rare chance to see a sizable chunk of what remains of the oldest surviving deck – known as the Visconti-Sforza, for the family it was created for – as the Morgan’s partial collection of the astonishingly gorgeous deck has been combined with that held by the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, Italy. “They’re hand-painted luxury objects and they stand at the very beginning of the tarot pictorial tradition,” said Joshua O’Driscoll, who co-curated the show’s Renaissance Symbols section with Francisco H Trujillo.
These early decks are truly a sight to behold, remarkable art works unto themselves that required knowledge of a wide variety of practices. “In order to make them, Bonifacio Bembo and his workshop had to master different types of art making, including panel painting, wall painting, and manuscript illumination,” Trujillo offered.
According to O’Driscoll, aside from the artistic grandeur, these Renaissance decks aren’t all that different from our contemporary ones. If you’re familiar enough with a contemporary deck, you’ll be able to find your way around the Visconti-Sforza. “This is one of the things that I find most surprising,” said O’Driscoll. “Despite being nearly 600 years old, the Renaissance decks at the core of the show will be recognizable to anyone familiar with tarot imagery.”
When the tarot originated in Italy, its primary inspiration was Petrarch’s series of poems known as the Triumphs, which charted a life path from sin to redemption. However, by the time of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, introduced in 1909 and by far the most widely used deck in the world, the range of influences had gotten much larger. In illustrating the deck, Smith was given free reign to pour out her imagination onto the minor arcana, and she drew on such diverse sources as the Bible, her friends, the Art-Nouveau movement and contemporary British society, just to name a few.
One of the Rider-Waite-Smith’s big innovations was to illustrate the minor arcana, which up to that point had seldom been given their own associated imagery. Gilman sees this as key to the unprecedented success of this deck. “It really enhances the mystery built into these cards, and also the accessibility,” she said, “because you could look at these cards and write this story into every single one. It really democratizes the cards and captures people’s fascination with them.”
Later decks would come from Crowley, although his Thoth Tarot was not mass produced in his lifetime, and David Palladini’s Aquarian Deck, which brings an Art Deco sensibility to the medieval iconography. Those took off in the 1960s and 70s, respectively, by which point the tarot floodgates had begun to open, setting up a massive jump in decks around the turn of the century. “Even with these decks, the number published in the 60s and 70s was quite limited compared to today,” Gilman said. “There’s absolutely no comparison. There’s hundreds and hundreds.”
Artists found ready inspiration in the tarot because it offered them something to build on – the foundation of a fully formed creative tradition and a set of ideas already in place, yet the imagery and archetypes offered up by the tarot were open-ended enough as to not stymie their impulses. “The best creativity comes when you have a starting point,” said Gilman. “A blank slate almost becomes stymying in a way.”
Among the more intriguing artistic collections offered in Tarot! are selections from British Surrealist Ithell Colquhoun’s deck, which Gilman described as the first fully abstract deck. “It’s called ‘Tarot as Color’ and each of the suits is assigned a hue. It’s just a really gorgeous deck.” Then there’s Xul Solar, an Argentine painter, inventor of imaginary languages, and close friend of Jorge Luis Borges, whose tarot deck is hand-painted. “He met Crowley on a trip to Europe, and his tarot brings a whole variety of references, including Mesoamerican references.”
Carrington is represented by a suite of work inspired by a collection of the major arcana she made. Gilman explained that Surrealist painters such as Carrington and Varo were less interested in making their own deck and more in using the mysticism of the tarot to their own artistic ends. “With the Surrealists, it’s less about making a full deck and more about how these tarot references populate, in a way, everything they’re doing visually,” she said. “There’s interest from the Surrealists in how these things challenge our understanding of the rational world.”
Gilman believes that the tarot hit a major turning point somewhere around 2019 – where the cards really started moving toward ubiquity – and a big assist from the pandemic helped them get onto their current meteoric trajectory. She sees in tarot a kind of universal language that can transcend cultural barriers and speak to virtually anyone who wants a little assistance on their life’s journey. “The arcana are so universal,” she said, “the world, justice, temperance, lovers – these are all things that occur in every tradition, so people can relate to it, and shift it and slant it according to what those things mean in their specific community.”
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