Colquhoun Taro

Ithell Colquhoun made these cards by pouring enamel paint and letting the pigment find its own forms, which makes this the rare tarot where the method is the argument. There are no figures and no scenes, just colour in motion, closer to a Rorschach plate than to any illustrated pack. Colquhoun was a surrealist painter and occult writer, and the deck reads as her wager that the arcana live underneath picture-making altogether: strip away the crowned figures and the named virtues, and what remains is whatever the eye brings. Adam McLean published the deck in 2009, well after Colquhoun's death, which is why a work this radical circulates as a collector's document rather than a mass-market pack. As a reading deck it is demanding by design, since every card asks you to do the seeing. As a record of where tarot and abstraction met, it has almost no rivals in the catalog. It suits readers who trust their own eye and historians of the tradition's avant-garde edge.