Pamela Coleman Smith created the artwork for the famous Raider-Waite tarot deck but her legacy has remained in the shadows of the mystic who commissioned the work, Arthur Edward Waite.
Hold a question in your mind, shuffle, select your cards and see into your future. For centuries, people of all walks of life have turned to tarot to divine what may lay ahead and reach a higher level of self-understanding.
Now, over 70 years after her death, the creator Pamela Colman Smith has been included in a new exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York highlighting many underappreciated artists of early 20th-century American modernism in addition to famous names like Georgia O'Keeffe and Louise Nevelson.Credit:Smith, like many other women artists of the era, was the victim of"the marginalization of female accomplishments," according to Barbara Haskell, the show's curator.
Pamela Colman Smith illustrated the most famous tarot deck, but her contributions were eclipsed by A.E. Waite, who commissioned her.In Smith's work,"she was drawn toward a kind of mystical vision of the world," Haskell said in a phone interview. She listened to music to unlock her subconscious mind, and reportedly had synesthesia -- a neurological condition that causes the person to see shapes or colors when they hear sounds.
Although Waite may have directed the concepts for those 22 cards, the imagery was all Smith's own. And since Waite was less interested in the Minor Arcana, which comprises 56 cards and were often more simplistic graphics like playing cards, those ideas were"totally hers," according to Haskell. Smith completed the 78 images from her Chelsea studio in London, using ink and watercolor.
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