London’s Warburg Institute, home to a significant archive of Crowleyana including the original paintings for the Thoth Tarot deck will be hosting an exhibit devoted to tarot starting January 24. The Institute is located at the University of London School of Advanced Study Woburn Square London WC1H 0AB. The posted description says
Tarot – Origins & Afterlives, the inaugural international exhibition in our new Kythera Gallery, will open on 31 January 2025, running until 30 April 2025. This groundbreaking exhibition explores tarot’s remarkable evolution, tracing its journey from its origins as a 15th-century card game in Renaissance Italy to its profound transformations into tools for divination, artistic creation, and storytelling.
The exhibition will present a historical overview of tarot, showcasing how it has been reimagined by artists, mystics, and writers over the centuries. Highlights include treasures from the Warburg’s own collections, many of which are being displayed for the first time, as well as significant loans from private and institutional archives. Exhibit highlights include:
- 15th-century Visconti tarot cards, the earliest surviving examples of tarot, from Northern Italy.
- Frieda Harris’s original paintings for Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot, displayed in England for the first time since her death in 1962.
- Austin Osman Spare’s hand-painted tarot deck from around 1906, featuring an innovative card connection system, recently rediscovered in The Magic Circle’s collections.
- Etteilla’s Livre de Thot cards, the first tarot cards explicitly designed for fortune-telling, from 18th-century France.
- A Tarotkammer, a cabinet of curiosities featuring contemporary tarot decks by artists such as Courtney Alexander, Plastique Fantastique, and Candida Powell-Williams.
https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/news/tarot-origins-afterlives-opening-soon-warburg-institute.
