It’s in the Cards: An Exhibition at London’s Warburg Institute Offers a History of Tarot

From Renaissance Milanese court painter Bonifacio Bembo to the Surrealists and even contemporary artist Claire Tabouret (who painted her home’s ceiling with images from an early-20th-century tarot deck), tarot—a centuries-old set of 78 cards—wafts in and out of art history. Between 1979 and 1998, French avant-garde artist Niki de Saint Phalle built a sculptural installation called the Tarot Garden outside Rome, and a newly opened show dedicated to British Surrealist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun at Tate St. Ives culminates in her version of a tarot deck.

The first historical overview exhibition in England dedicated to tarot, “Tarot—Origins & Afterlives,” recently opened at London’s Warburg Institute, co-curated by the institute’s director, Bill Sherman. The Warburg Institute, a center for the study of art and culture, has a unique tarot collection: Its founder, German art historian Aby Warburg, was one of the earliest modern scholars to study its evolution, collecting decks and books on the subject beginning in the early 1900s. He devoted a panel of his unfinished photographic project, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (1927–29), to tarot, spanning 15th-century Tarocchi di Mantegna to the popular 19th-century Tarot de Marseille.

“I can’t remember a more unsettled moment [than now]. And so, for younger people in particular, I think they’re looking for alternatives,” says Sherman, “Tarot offers them that possibility—a way of bringing in, if not certainty, at least some agency.”

The exhibition divides the 600-year history of tarot into four periods, starting with the origin of tarot in the 1430s in northern Italy. For centuries before tarot was linked with fortune-telling, it was just a game. The show includes a digital presentation of the Sola-Busca Tarot, the world’s oldest surviving complete tarot deck, dating to around 1490, from the collection of Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera. This deck—which intrigues scholars because of its mysterious iconography drawing on alchemy, Christian stories, and Hermetic rituals—is illustrated with printed engravings that were hand painted with tempera and gold.

Tarot migrated from northern Italy to southern France in the late 15th century, eventually resulting in mass-produced and widely available Tarot de Marseille decks. These are the basis for the conventional tarot decks available today.

“It’s hard to think of another area of cultural life where a particular set of symbols gets established so early and stays, for now 600 years,” says Sherman of the iconographic stamina of this game. Images on the deck’s 22 named cards such as the wheel of fortune, hanged man, and hierophant have been around since the early 16th century. “It’s an incredible, enduring symbolic structure.”

The next phase of tarot started in the 1780s, when it morphed from a game to a divination tool, thanks to French clergyman and scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin, who claimed that tarot held ancient Egyptian wisdom from a text called the Book of Thoth. Before long, Parisian print seller Jean-Baptiste Alliette adopted this (unfounded) theory and designed the first tarot deck to be explicitly used for fortune telling.

During the 20th century, tarot migrated from obscure secret societies to the mainstream. One early deck from this period resurfaced a decade ago, discovered in the collection of a club in London for theatrical musicians called the Magic Circle. Illustrated in 1906 by artist and mystic Austin Osman Spare, the deck combined regular playing cards with tarot.

Another highlight from this period in the Warburg exhibition are the original 81 paintings, by English artist Lady Frieda Harris, that were used to illustrate the Thoth Tarot. Never before presented in public, the paintings are being shown in a rotating display of nine at a time.

The exhibition ends with a look at tarot’s current iteration, updated for contemporary life. “Sometimes it’s about political or social action,” Sherman notes. “It’s a lot of what I would call activist tarot at the moment.” A deck created by London-based artist John Walter during the Covid pandemic and called the Lockdown Tarot, for example, has references to politics and art history and includes characters from our own time. The late film director David Lynch is on a card called The Portal, while Donald Trump appears on a literal trump card as the King of Vaccines.

Tarot is very much still part of the zeitgeist, the show argues, just as it’s always been. “It’s a very accessible form. It’s a given structure, a given symbol set, and a given format,” Sherman explains. “For the most part it’s a small, handheld, rectangular object that pretty much anyone can make or buy. And I think that’s quite different from a lot of the art world.”  

“Tarot—Origins & Afterlives” runs through April 30.