Tarot has worn many guises over the centuries. Today, the tarot card deck is considered a divinatory tool, associated with mysticism and the occult. But its origins were anything but witchy; it was born as a courtly game played in the halls of Renaissance Italy.
“Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions,” a new exhibition on view at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, traces the fascinating transformations and visual evolutions of the tarot. It covers everything from its earliest origins as expanded sets of standard playing cards to its mystical use as a divinatory system to today, when contemporary artists are endlessly reimagining the possibilities of the tarot’s visual archetypes.
The Morgan Library & Museum is a particularly fitting venue for the exhibition. J. Pierpont Morgan, the founder and financier of the library, was a devotee of the occult who frequently consulted astrologers to read his charts. He was an inveterate card player, to boot. In 1911, Morgan acquired 35 lavishly decorated 15th-century playing cards, known as the Visconti-Sforza cards. From that early acquisition, the Morgan Library has continued a tradition of collecting tarot-related materials, much of which is included in the exhibition.
“Tarot!” is divided into two parts, “Renaissance Visions” curated by Joshua O’Driscoll and “Modern Visions” curated by Claire Gilman. “Modern Visions” brings together works by Surrealist artists such as Leonora Carrington and Salvador Dalí, alongside recent creations by Alison Saar, Marcel Dzama, and new commissions by Chris Ofili. Unlike their Renaissance counterparts, modern and contemporary tarot decks have become a popular medium for expressing spirituality, politics, and identity.
Artists using tarot for personal cosmologies
Many other contemporary artists in the exhibition had adapted tarot as a mutable symbolic system for representing inner states, dreams, ecology, and personal memories.
Several decks in the exhibition were created during the COVID-19 lockdowns, like Nicolas Bruno’s Somnia Tarot (2020), which filters tarot through his personal experiences with sleep paralysis at the time. Likewise, German artist Kerstin Brätsch’s “PARA PSYCHIC” drawings (2020–21) combine tarot with plant medicine, maps, medieval books, and esoteric knowledge systems.
These works, and many others in the exhibition, emphasize the adaptability of the tarot. “Tarot lends itself to new interpretations. Indeed, it is in its very DNA. And so it provides a framework that artists can modify and innovate, and that can accommodate multiple communities and perspectives,” said Gilman.