Morgan Library's 'Tarot' Show Traces Cards' Art History
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- The Morgan Library & Museum opened 'Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions' in New York, running through October 4, with the show curated across sections by Claire Gilman, Joshua O'Driscoll, and Francisco H Trujillo.
- Curator Claire Gilman said the tarot originated in 15th-century Italy as a card game, acquiring occult associations only after migrating to 18th-century France — a framing the show uses to reframe tarot as art history rather than mysticism.
- The Visconti-Sforza deck, the oldest surviving tarot, is displayed in a rare collaboration combining the Morgan's partial collection with holdings from the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, Italy, showing hand-painted cards recognizable to modern players despite being nearly 600 years old.
- The 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith deck, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith — a William Butler Yeats intimate whose work was admired by Alfred Stieglitz — revolutionized the format by illustrating the minor arcana, a move Gilman credits with 'democratizing' the cards and making it the world's most widely used deck.
- More than two dozen artists are featured, including Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, whose Surrealist works use tarot references to 'challenge our understanding of the rational world' rather than produce a full deck, plus new work by Chris Ofili and a first fully abstract deck by Ithell Colquhoun called 'Tarot as Color.'
- Gilman dates tarot's current ubiquity to around 2019, with the pandemic accelerating searches for readings and independent bookstores now stocking 'at least a dozen' decks, compared to the limited output of the 1960s and 70s decks by Crowley and David Palladini.
Why it matters: The Morgan is using tarot's pandemic-era pop-culture boom to make a serious art-historical argument: that a deck of playing cards became one of art's most durable creative scaffolds, still recognizable after six centuries. The pairing of a $100M+ institution with a market that has exploded from niche mysticism to Barnes & Noble shelf staple reframes tarot as a legitimate subject of curatorial study rather than New Age kitsch.
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