The Morgan Library Shows How Tarot Cards Have Ignited Artistic Imaginations

Once the domain of new age bookstores and the woo-woo fringes, tarot cards are now being showcased at the Morgan Library. In an exhibit entitled “Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions,” which traces both their history and evolution, the library delves into the origins of fortune-telling cards. It also richly explores its persistent hold on the artistic imagination. Most importantly, it traces the long continuity of the Renaissance pictorial tradition, a school of image making that has persisted in its own modified way throughout tarot’s history.Though tarot cards might seem an odd choice for the Morgan Library, the institution is surprisingly well-suited for it. When he wasn’t saving the American monetary system from collapse, J.P. Morgan was an avid card player and was also fascinated with the occult collecting tarot decks and tarot related material. This includes his purchase of 35 of the Visconti-Sforza playing cards from the 15th century, one of the oldest known tarot decks in existence. The entire show, in fact, manages to gather an impressive amount of vanishingly rare historical material under a single roof.The show is divided into two large but separate suites. One side is devoted to the tarot’s Renaissance origins while the second suite devotes itself to modernist interpretations of tarot. Both are meticulous and exhaustive.On the Renaissance side, we learn that tarot began as a sophisticated parlor game called “Triomfi,” or cards of triumph. It consisted of a standard deck of four suits but added twenty-two additional “trump” cards, resulting in a 78-card deck. These added figures — such as the Emperor, the world, or even death — were based on the allegorical “Triumphs” of Petrarch, who similarly addressed similar themes. These gave the cards an intellectual appeal favored by the Italian nobility. The Fool served as a special “wildcard,” much like the Joker.The game was all the rage among the Northern Italian nobility, who demanded ever more elaborate and beautiful decks. Several are handsomely displayed here, including the Visconti-Sforza Tarot produced by 15th-century Italian painter Bonificio Bembo. These are some of finest examples of early Renaissance image production of the time, with much attention paid to miniaturist detail, gold leaf, and overall sumptuousness. Another series of tarot-related prints, possibly by Lazzaro Bastiani, also exemplify some of the most beautifully disciplined draughtsmanship of the period.These exceedingly rare examples give us a thorough picture of tarot’s starting point. We learn from the exhibit that for the first three centuries tarot cards were a game of high skill and nothing more. That is, until a Protestant pastor and freemason Antoine Court de Gébelin speculated that the tarot was a school of magic in symbolic guise. De Gebelin maintained an Egyptian magical system was hidden in the cards and all that was needed was a proper esoteric key with which to decode it. Then an occultist who travelled under the pseudonym “Etiella,” Jean-Baptiste Alliette, codified Gebelin’s thesis. After undertaking research, he claimed that tarot conveyed secrets once hammered onto sheets of gold and recovered from an Egyptian temple of fire. He codified this knowledge into the divinatory tarot method followed by devotees today.Occult tarot doesn’t truly triumph, however, until the Rider-Waite tarot deck is produced in 1909. Drawn by the English artist Pamela Colman Smith under the direction of poet and mystic Arthur Edward Waite, the Waite Deck was the first printed deck to be widely successful as a method of divination.Waite was a full initiate of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a British turn of the last century mystery school that combined Egyptian symbolism, esoteric Kabbalah, and elements of Rosicrucianism. The Nobel prize winning poet WB Yeats was a member, as was the infamous pioneering mountain climber and occultist Aleister Crowley. Waite’s deck remains one of the most popular decks in use today.‘Photograph from The Mountain Dream Tarot,’ by Bea Nettles, 1975. Photograph: Bea NettlesThe shows exhaustive history then jumps over to the modernist side to demonstrate what Tarot has become. With the full flourishing of the British occult revival, we see Crowley take the reins with his own Thoth deck, a symbolic reworking that goes far beyond Waite’s deck to supply a visual index of an entire esoteric system. Illustrated by Lady Frieda Harris, whose original mock-ups are provided here, we can see that they are among the most beautiful examples of deco-inspired Babylonian and Egyptian revival from the period.There is also art and tarot marginalia from other occult luminaries. A very rare tarot series by artist, writer and father of sigil magic, Austin Osmond Spare, is included. Work by American artist, witch, and companion of notable warlock and founder of the jet propulsion laboratory, Jack Parsons, Marjorie Cameron, is also included. Tarot, in other words, became a who’s who of early modernist occultism, where the worlds of high art and magic, popular culture and sublime bohemian lunacy, became conjoined.This becomes evident in the rest of this surprisingly exhaustive exhibit, which shows the profound effect of tarot on surrealism and finally contemporary art. Leonara Carrington, Andre Breton, Remedios Varo, Niki de Saint Phalle and even Chris Ofili make an appearance.The exhibition comprehensively shows that tarot serves as a unique springboard for the artistic imagination through the way it amalgamates high and low, and the popular and occult. Tarot inspired parlor games, folk archetypes, the pictorial traditions of the Renaissance, and a search for illumination that has not ended.

The Morgan Library Shows How Tarot Cards Have Ignited Artistic Imaginations

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