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.
How Surrealist artists reinvented tarot
By the mid-20th century, the tarot had become the sphere of predicting occultists. The famous Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, created in 1909, was conceived as a collaboration between artist Pamela Colman Smith and British poet Arthur Edward Waite, both of whom were members of the Golden Dawn, a British mystical organization.
The Surrealists changed that, adapting the motifs and symbols of the tarot deck to express their own interests in the unconscious, magic, and a sense of imagination unchained from the strictures of rationality. “The Surrealists associated rational masculinist thinking with the traumas of the war and they turned to the occult—and tarot specifically—as an alternative way of understanding the universe, one that embraced hidden, enigmatic meanings rather than straightforward, unidirectional thinking,” explained Gilman.
Famously, in 1940 and 1941, while André Breton and other Surrealists were stranded in Marseille awaiting exit visas during the war, these artists came together to create Le Jeu de Marseille, a tarot deck that replaced the traditional suits. Flames, wheels, stars, and locks symbolized love, revolution, dreams, and knowledge, respectively—and they recast court cards as geniuses, sirens, and mages associated with figures they admired, like Sigmund Freud and famed French psychic Hélène Smith. The exhibition includes Le Jeu de Marseille, as well as preparatory drawings.
Other Surrealist examples in the show highlight how artists adapted the tarot to create personal mythologies. In Victor Brauner’s painting The Surrealist (1947), the artist pictures himself as the magician from the Tarot de Marseille, an iconic deck that developed in France during the 17th and 18th centuries. Artists like Carrington and Remedios Varo, meanwhile, utilized archetypes from the tarot within their unique symbolic worlds to represent occultism, alchemy, and spiritual transformation. “The tarot Arcana are open-ended, their meaning dependent on who is reading them, who is receiving them, and in what context. This kind of openness appealed to the Surrealists,” Gilman added.
These works expanded the meaning of the tarot into a more widely recognized cultural language: a series of symbols.
Tarot in contemporary art
Today, contemporary artists have stretched tarot’s expressive possibilities even beyond the Surrealist imagination. Many of those in the exhibition have adapted the tarot deck to tell stories of people, histories, and spiritualities previously unseen in the canonical decks.
Among these is Indianapolis-based artist Courtney Alexander’s Dust II Onyx: A Melanated Tarot (2017). Alexander admired the way tarot managed to combine symbolism from across spiritual traditions, but was acutely aware that, as an African American woman, she did not see herself represented in the cards. With Dust II Onyx: A Melanated Tarot, Alexander created a deck that incorporates a wide range of figures from the African diaspora, from popular-culture icons such as Grace Jones and Willow Smith, along with images of the Mursi and Maasai peoples of East Africa and the Asante of West Africa.
French Martinican artist Elizabeth Colomba, meanwhile, first encountered tarot through a reading on Los Angeles’s Venice Beach boardwalk, where she was moved by the way the woman was “channeling an entire lineage of myth, psychology, and intuition.” The artist has recently started a series that focuses on the “positive outcome cards” from the Major Arcana, depicting Black women in regal settings.
Also included in these reimaginings of the tarot’s representation are Alison Saar’s drawings for Skowhegan Tarot Swords cards (2016), which similarly draw on the archetypes of the Rider-Waite-Smith while incorporating divine Yoruba orishas and figures from African American history.
Tarot in political art
While tarot has long been associated with otherworldly realms, some contemporary artists are using the language of tarot to address the social and political realities here on Earth. Artist Cristy C. Road’s The Next World Tarot (2020), for instance, reenvisions the tarot deck through contemporary social issues and social change, picturing protests and scenes of anti-colonialism.
Meanwhile, American artist and trans-rights advocate Edie Fake’s diptych Two of Wands (2025) explores a single card. Associated with forward motion, the card inspired Fake as a way to address anti-trans politics in the leadup to the 2024 election.
Ofili’s 2026 commission for the exhibition tackles fraught histories as well. The British artist has imagined a tarot deck through the lens of Trinidad Carnival, tapping into the lineage of masquerade as a form of resistance. In Diablo (2026), Ofili recreates the tarot’s devil card to play with the racist history of Trinidad’s Carnival. The “Jab Molassie” depicted wears a blackened face, just like white masqueraders who pretended to be enslaved Black Trinidadians, who were banned from attending the 17th- and 18th-century carnivals.
“I think the impetus for the turn to tarot in the contemporary moment and among artists in particular is similar to the reason the Surrealists turned to tarot,” said Gilman. “In times of social and political uncertainty, we seek new ways of understanding our existence and alternative means of navigating the world.”
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.
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