People have always been fascinated by the act of predicting or having their future predicted with tarot cards. Some are tempted to know what’s going to happen, while others simply dismiss it as nonsense.
But for artists, the twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana and the fifty-six cards of the Minor Arcana have been the subject of artistic creation. It’s a subject that seems to impose constraints on the artist, because each card is different; the Arcana have to have easily recognisable attributes and are confined to the vertical, narrow and depthless space of a playing card.
In the past, a lot of artists have devoted themselves to this. One of the most famous decks created in the twentieth century is that of Salvador Dalì. But perhaps the most original representation of the Tarot cards is the Tarot Garden, with sculptures, created in Capalbio by the Franco-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle, together with other artists such as Jean Tinguely, who also supported it financially. The artist used various materials (cement, stone and metal for the sculptures’ armatures) and Murano glass for the mosaics, and was assisted by a large group of craftsmen and assistants. The Arcana are huge, colourful and round sculptures. The artist loved round shapes because, as she said, “the world is round”.
Leonora Carrington, the surrealists, and the tarot cards
In 2017, a deck of tarot cards created by the British artist in Mexico was discovered during the preparation of an exhibition dedicated to Leonora Carrington at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico.
Some of the works found were then exhibited in the Magical Tale exhibition dedicated to the artist (link to the article here), which resulted in a book with various critical contributions.
Le Jeu de Marseille
The theme of divination and its representation by surrealist artists was also one of the strands of the exhibition dedicated to surrealism and magical representations at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice in 2022.
In 1941, a group of surrealist artists fleeing Nazism in Marseilles created a deck of cards while waiting to leave Europe. Some of these tarot cards were on show in the exhibition organised by the Peggy Guggenheim Museum, which partly echoed some of the themes of one of the historical sections (The Witch’s Cradle) of the 2022 Venice Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemani (Here the link to my blog – The milk of dreams-e-max-ernst).
The tarot of Pino Settanni
The exhibition centre Stanze della fotografia ( Fondazione Cini-Marsilio editore) dedicated an Exhibition to the photographer Pino Settannni in 2023, in particular to his project on the Tarot cards.
The Puglian photographer is known for his evocative images of artists and entertainers wrapped in red scarves. From 1994, he created his stagings of models to represent his colourful tarot cards.
In 2015, the Archivio Luce acquired the archive of Pino Settanni from his wife, consisting of approximately 60,000 photographs. It was the first private archive of a photographer to be acquired by the public institution affiliated to Cinecittà .
The Archivio Luce preserves various materials and supervises their restoration and enhancement. As the materials are perishable, the negatives are first digitised and then archived.
The last visual arts born before the digital age, developed between the 19th and 20th centuries, are paradoxically the most ephemeral due to their extremely fragile supports: films and negatives.
Pino Settanni chose monochromatic colours for the minor arcana and a variety of colours for the major ones. Almost all of them were staged with actresses, even where the arcana traditionally have a male subject and there is only one actor.
Some photos show the backstage, and sketches drawn by the photographer himself were also exhibited.
.https://www.veniceartguide.it
Venice, July 2024
