Love, work, social life, family, money… is an easy relief when you experience a feeling of panic at the crossroads of your existence. There’s no point remaining motionless in front of the different paths to take and the choices to make.
You can now treat your aversion for uncertainty with taste with the Salvador Dalí tarot deck.
Surrealist master Salvador Dalí’s tarot cards have been re-released three decades after they were first created.
Much like the phantasmagoric universe of the padre of surrealism, the origin of the tarot deck remains somewhat blurry. In 1973, producer Albert Broccoli commissioned Salvador Dalí to make a tarot for a James Bond film, Live and Let Die, Roger Moore’s first cinematic outing as 007.
Unfortunately, the project collapsed and Dalí’s masterpiece would never be seen on screen. Instead, a deck of tarot cards designed by a less famous and cheaper artist, Fergus Hall, was used by Bond to seduce the beautiful Solitaire, played by Jane Seymour.
Rumour says the contract between Broccoli and Dalí felt through because the surrealist asked for a tremendous amount of money. But one needs more to discourage Dalí, who decided to distribute the mystifying tarot deck as a limited edition in 1984.
And because spirituality is so hot right now, publisher Taschen has reproduced the full deck imagined by the painter of The Persistence of Memory. In total, 78 cards.
Let’s take a look at the Magician card, featuring the artist himself, joined by some of his best-known works; or the Queen of Cups, proudly wearing a moustache and a goatee. Salvador Dalí even reproduced his wife, Gala, as Impress, an ode to female empowerment. In a nod towards the James Bond setback, Dalí gave the Emperor Sean Connery’s face.
“The fact that I myself, at the moment of painting, do not understand my own pictures, does not mean that these pictures have no meaning; on the contrary, their meaning is so profound, complex, coherent, and involuntary that it escapes the most simple analysis of logical intuition”, had said the surrealist.
Accompanied by an explanatory booklet including descriptions of the artwork, this more-than-another-Smith-Waite-replica will be available from November 11 via Taschen.
