Inside art’s long love affair with tarot

When I bought my first tarot deck in 2018, I was definitely a little afraid of it. As I sat at my makeup table giving the cards their first shuffle, I averted my eyes from the mirror, lest I see their hidden faces. Peeking felt impolite, and I didn’t want to anger them.

I’ve since learned that tarot cards aren’t possessed—and that beyond tarot’s use in divination and mediumship, it offers frameworks for self-reflection and storytelling. No matter how much taboo the cards have shed, however, I still meet others intimidated by their occult associations. Tarot’s enigmatic history, obscured by misunderstandings and material fragility alike, hasn’t helped. Now, an exhibit at New York’s Morgan Museum titled “Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions” is elucidating those origins.

Querents have been pulling spreads tailored to their questions since the 18th century. Tarot first emerged 400 years prior, though, as a courtly game in Renaissance Italy. According to “Tarot!,” the cards’ structure was partly inspired by “Triumphs,” a then-popular poem by 14th-century Italian scholar Petrarch comparing the eponymous military ceremony with the soul’s succession through increasingly powerful rites wherein chastity trumps love, fame trumps death, and so on. Tarot originally echoed these rules. The cards only shifted from noble diversion to fortune-telling tool in the 1700s, when French occultists falsely assigned them with mystical origins dating back to ancient Egypt.

 

Today’s standard 78-card deck was solidified during the Renaissance. That includes the 22 archetypal “trump” cards inspired by Petrarch—spanning recognizable designs like Strength’s lion tamer and Death's reaper—as well as 56 pip cards across four suits, now signifying action, intellect, emotion, and materiality. Whereas the trumps represent long-term themes, the pips account for daily minutiae. Together, they distill existence down to 78 striking vignettes.

Only 15 or so Renaissance-era decks survive. The oldest three appear in “Tarot!”—a rare treat, since these illuminated, emotive cards are rarely exhibited. In fact, this marks the first time they’re displayed together in the United States. “It is the absolute best chance people will have in our generation to see Renaissance tarot in this country,” Joshua O’Driscoll, co-curator and head of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts at the Morgan, tells me over the phone. “Seeing them with related artwork from the 15th century—that just won't happen again.”

The exhibit encompasses two sections. “Renaissance Symbols” recounts tarot’s roots, while “Modern Visions” honors how artists have advanced its alluring, universal, yet customizable format. Both unfurl chronologically around their own rooms. In the red-and-purple-walled “Renaissance Symbols,” the three early decks radiate in cases alongside a selection of artworks and crafts of the time, conjuring the artistic context from which the cards emerged, courtesy of finery like sumptuous Renaissance-era fabric, a hand-drawn stock figure book from the circle of 14th-century master Tommaso Da Modena, and the earliest known set of playing cards, created in the Netherlands during the late 15th century.

 

Perhaps most strikingly, “Tarot!” presents the original Sola Busca Tarot (circa 1491) in its full glory. These colorful, engaging cards offer a bridge between Renaissance-era tarot decks and the cards as we know them now. Not only is the Sola Busca Tarot the only existing Renaissance deck that remains fully complete, it also originated a style for illustrating pip cards that contemporary artists still use. Rather than simply representing numbers, these cards feature figures: women, men, and children grappling with four coins here or six swords there.

The Sola Busca deck is presented alongside cards from the seminal Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot of 1909, the deck that likely comes to mind when one thinks of tarot today. Illustrated by British artist and occultist Pamela Colman Smith, the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot draws from the earliest tarot decks for its trump cards—today called the major arcana—while directly referencing the Sola Busca deck for its pips, now known as the minor arcana. Smith’s overwhelmed Ten of Wands and heartbroken Three of Swords, for instance, are dead ringers of those from Sola Busca.

 

Across the way, “Modern Visions” affords recent history equal attention, exploring the many manners in which artists have played with the cards. This airier room begins with tarot’s arrival in the U.K. courtesy of Smith’s milieu, followed by a tribute to the surrealists, who treasured tarot’s capacity to access the subconscious. British legend Leonora Carrington’s 1955 take on the major arcana—rediscovered in 2017—ranks among the movement’s most coveted resulting decks. Crafted in Mexico City, where Carrington flourished after escaping institutionalization in 1941, these revelatory cards emulsify the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot and the Tarot de Marseille (another early inspiration for Smith, circa 1650) in Carrington’s fantastical sensibilities. The results are simple yet regal—a little political, even, since Carrington substituted androgynous figures for the traditionally male Hanged Man and Devil.

Selections from Salvador Dalí’s Universal Tarot (1984), originally commissioned as a potential prop for the eighth James Bond film, are on view in the lounge between the show’s halves. Here, the artist himself plays the Magician in a deck of multilayered cultural references. Seven other decks published since the 1970s surround it, each pairing tarot with their own unique slant, from pulp fiction to Black power. A nearby TV shows snippets from several tarot-related films, including The Holy Mountain (1973), by Chilean-French director Alejandro Jodorowsky. This esoteric jaunt, bankrolled by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, animates the newfound notion of interpreting the major arcana as the Fool’s journey. (Jodorowsky believed tarot should only deal in self-refinement, exhorting, “You must not talk about the future.”)

The next section in “Modern Visions” tracks how artists continued pushing tarot amidst the rise of American counterculture movements throughout the ’60s and ’70s. Between 1968 and 1969, for instance, German artist Dorothy Iannone translated her lover’s daily routines through tarot’s recognizable logic, creating 56 colorful compositions that encapsulate the couple’s honeymoon phase. In 1975, Illinois-based Bea Nettles released the first fully photographic deck after the idea came to her in a dream. Three years later, French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle began building a Tuscan wonderland of 22 massive, immersive sculptures based on the major arcana. Even pop art’s so-called godfather, Larry Rivers, who hardly harbored occult affinities, drew New York socialite Kitty Meyer as the Empress.

Like societal uncertainty, tarot’s popularity has only grown since then. Artists have continued consulting the cards for intel and ideas. “Modern Visions” concludes with experiments from the past decade, most of which continue synthesizing the cards with an ever-widening array of worldviews. In 2017, for example, American artist Courtney Alexander created Dust II Onyx: A Melanated Tarot, addressing the Rider-Waite-Smith’s absent diversity. In 2020, artist duo Hilma’s Ghost collaborated with a witch on an abstract deck. Five freshly commissioned collages by British artist Chris Ofili combine the major arcana’s archetypes with the characters of Trinidad's Carnival.

“We want to demonstrate that tarot was, from its beginning, something that major artists were working on,” O’Driscoll tells me. After all, before tarot became magic, it was a medium.

This article originally appeared on harpersbazaar.com/US in August 2026.

Image credits: Courtesy The Morgan Library & Museum, and Artists Rights Society

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