Salvador Dalí, El Mago, courtesy of Taschen, via Another Man
In the early 1970s, the producer Albert R. Broccoli commissioned the artist Salvador Dalí to make a tarot deck for the upcoming James Bond film Live and Let Die. Based on Ian Fleming’s 1954 novel of the same name, Live and Let Die was released in 1973—the eighth 007 film and the first to star Roger Moore. It a strange, mystical Bond movie, that’s part an attempt at Blacksploitation and part about Harlem gangsters, Caribbean drug farming, and voodoo-practicing witch doctors. In one scene, a psychic named Solitaire (Jane Seymour), reads a tarot deck. This was to be Dalí’s contribution to the film.
Dalí began work on the deck, but it never made it into the film. Reportedly, Dalí’s fee was ultimately too high, so the producers went with another deck, The Tarot of the Witches, created by the artist Fergus Hall. But Dalí continued to work on his deck, anyway, eventually completing it more than a decade later. The Tarot was published in 1984 (less than five years before his death at age 84), and sold out in that original edition.
Dalí’s wife Gala was a tarot reader, so perhaps this is one of the reasons why he was drawn to the project even after the film commission didn’t pan out. He includes her in the deck, as the Empress, while he paints himself as the Magician. (Apparently, he painted the previous James Bond, Sean Connery, as the Emperor, in a joke about being fired from the Roger Moore production… looking at that card right now, I don’t think it’s entirely clear if it is Connery, but the idea is rather amusing.)
The tarot is a full 78-card deck, with each card an original work of art, usually a composite of gouache painting and collage/lithography. Dalí included references to major events in Western history; for example, the Ten of Swords card depicts the stabbing of Julius Caesar, while the Queen of Cups is a jokey vandalism of François Clouet’s portrait Elisabeth of Austria, Queen of France. Here are a few highlights:
Gala Dalí as the “Empress” Cartamundi, Turnhout Belgium/Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala- Salvador Dalí, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019; via Smithsonian Magazine
“La Muerte,” Courtesy of Taschen; via AnotherMan
“Queen of Cups,” Courtesy of Taschen; via AnotherMan
“Ten of Swords,” Courtesy of Taschen; via AnotherMan
Cards from one of the original Dalí printed decks are currently on display at the “Tarot!” exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City.
In 2019, Taschen released a special, multilingual edition of the Dalí Tarot: the full 78-card deck along with an accompanying book written by tarot expert Johannes Fiebig.