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Surrealism and the Tarot: A Love Story

edited by Tessel M. Bauduin

£40.00

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Description

You may know Salvador Dalí's striking surrealist tarot deck, or Leonora Carrington's recently discovered tarot designs, perhaps even André Breton's mysterious novel Arcane 17, inspired by The Star card. These well-known examples hint at a much deeper story — the rich and complex relationship between Surrealism and the tarot.
The surrealists turned to tarot cards for divination, certainly, yet this represents only one facet of their extensive and versatile century-long engagement with tarot. In surrealist work and practice we find the tarot as oracular tools, maps for initiatory journeys of self-discovery, countercultural objects, and aesthetic inspiration. Many surrealists' radical imaginations took tarot sets or individual cards as starting or reference points for new creative work in literature, film, painting, and display design, among others.
Surrealism and the Tarot: A Love Story is the first book to explore these issues in depth. This groundbreaking and extensively illustrated collection brings together leading scholars to illuminate a fascinating but understudied aspect of surrealist practice. Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Remedios Varo, Roberto Matta, Penny Slinger, Jorge Comacho, Marie Wilson and Victor Brauner are among the many surrealist luminaries discussed in this volume. Drawing on previously unexplored archives and featuring rare illustrations, this collection reveals how tarot became a key catalyst for surrealist creativity and spiritual exploration.

Cover design by Studio Mingus.

 

Publication date: December 4th, 2025.
Please note: this title will not be available from Amazon, or via wholesale channels.

Details

Hardback
30cm x 24cm
212 pages
174 coloured illustrations | 10 monochrome
2.2 kg
English text

Contents

1. Introduction: Surrealist Games, Fortunes, and Cards — Tessel M. Bauduin 

2. Triumphant Trumps to Occult Tarots: a Mini-History — Tessel M. Bauduin 

3. ‘Le Jour est un attentat’: An Experimental System of Knowledge by Leonora Carrington, Charles Duits, and Roberto Matta — Paulina Caro Troncoso 

4. Kay Sage and the Tarot — Jennifer Jäger

5. The Star in André Breton’s Arcane 17 — Michael Richardson 

6. Reaching for the Stars: Matta’s Tarot Cards — Tessel M. Bauduin 

7. The 1947 Tarot Stairway: a Gothic Trajectory of Initiation — Tessel M. Bauduin 

8. Victor Brauner: The Surrealist and The Lovers — Daniel Zamani 

9. ‘Sirens of Knowledge’: Re-visions of the Juggler in the Work of Female Surrealists — Victoria Ferentinou 

10. Morphologies of Death: Tarot, Alchemy and Heraldry in the Art of Jorge Camacho — Will Atkin

11. Finding a Path in a World of Signs: Tarot in Post-war Parisian Surrealism — Anne Foucault 

12. The Tarot in André Breton’s L’Art magique — Claudia Mesch

13. The Perfume of the Secret Rose: Ithell Colquhoun and the Taro — Robert Shehu-Ansell 

14. Leonora Carrington, The Sun (XVIIII), 1962 — Susan Aberth and Tere Arcq

15. For Valentine Reading the Tarot: Valentine Penrose — Felicity Gee 

16. Penny Slinger’s Dakini Oracle— Judith Noble

17. The Magician’s Card Tricks: Interrogating Dalí’s Tarot Deck — Elliott H. King

18. The Invention of a Cinematic Tarot: Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain (1973) and its Surrealist Intertexts — Abigail Susik

19. Surrealist Resonances in Contemporary Tarot Decks — Emily E. Auger 

Notes
Bibliography

 

Further Publications

Magic Art

Original price was: £69.95.Current price is: £35.00.

The Dance of Moon and Sun: Ithell Colquhoun, British Women and Surrealism

Original price was: £40.00.Current price is: £22.00.

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