Tarot in Surrealist Art: Breton, Carrington, Spare

AdminOct 9, 2026

3 min read

In the Morgan exhibition, the second part shows how tarot entered modern art. The Surrealists played a key role: André Breton and his circle made their own deck, and some of the cards on display are on loan from Marseille. It is a story about how an old symbolic language became living material for artists again.

Surrealism emerged in Paris in the 1920s. Its participants sought to move beyond rational thinking and approach the unconscious: dreams, chance associations and images that do not obey logic. Tarot suited this task, because its images are multivalent and open to interpretation, just as the Surrealist program itself was.

Death from the Rider-Waite deck (1909). For the Surrealists, images like this were not predictions but material for working with the unconscious.

Three names

André Breton: poet and founder of Surrealism, who sought images in the cards that open the unconscious.
Leonora Carrington: an artist who created her own deck. Her work is shown in the exhibition.
Austin Osman Spare: an English artist who designed several decks.

André Breton wrote the first Surrealist manifesto in 1924 and became the central figure of the movement. His interest in tarot was part of a wider fascination with occult and symbolic systems. For him the cards were not a prediction but a way to step beyond habitual perception and see connections that logic does not notice.

The Moon: Surrealists loved this image as a symbol of dreams and shadows.

Leonora Carrington is one of the most vivid figures of Surrealism. Her works combine myth, dreams and fantastical narratives, and her own deck in the exhibition shows how the artist reworked the symbolism. Carrington did not simply use the cards as ready-made images: she created new ones that spoke her language.

Austin Osman Spare worked in a different tradition: he developed his own magical practices and created images that often balanced between art and ritual. His decks show that tarot can be not only a system of predictions but also a personal symbolic mythology that the artist builds himself.

For these artists tarot was not a way to predict but a material.

What it means for the reader

The Surrealists show that the cards can be read as art. This is useful for a practitioner, because it breaks the illusion of a single correct meaning. The same card can be a key to a personal story, a prompt for a drawing or a poem, an object of analysis. The more ways you have of seeing a card, the richer your dialogue with it becomes.

If you want to try the Surrealist approach, choose one card and create a short story, drawing or collage about it without looking at the traditional meaning. Then compare your image with what the tradition says. The difference between them often turns out to be the most interesting result.

The Surrealist reading is also useful for a critical view. It reminds us that every meaning of a card was once someone’s choice. Understanding this, one can calmly revisit familiar interpretations without accepting them as unbreakable laws.

For more on the exhibition and its works, see the Art Newspaper article and the Wild Hunt review. They show that a deck can live beyond divination: it can be read as art and as a document of its era.

If you want to see how the Surrealist language changed, compare works from different years. It becomes clear that artists gradually moved from direct quotation of traditional images to their own symbolic vocabulary.