Wild Cards

Artist Niki de Saint Phalle's career-defining masterpiecea wondrous sculpture garden in Tuscany-centers on the mystical images of the tarot deck. Lauren Elkin ponders the works and her chosen path through them.

TWO AND A HALF hours' drive south of Florence, we finally saw the tips of the sculptures on a hilltop outside Garavicchio, a medieval village in southern Tuscany. Flashes of blue and green and white and red caught my eye, the sun glinting off mirrored tiles. I held my breath as we made our way up the drive. I had read so much about Niki de Saint Phalle's tarot garden that to actually see it in real life seemed as fantastical as the fact that it existed at all.

Tarot cards are not meant to foretell the future but to provide images to quietly, subtly seed the subconscious. Perhaps for this reason the iconography of the tarot deck has long held an allure for artists. Surrealists Leonora Carrington and Salvador Dalí designed their own decks; printmaker Betye Saar worked tarot cards the star, the moon-into some early, important pieces; director Agnès Varda famously began her film Cléo from 5 to 7 with a tarot reading. But Saint Phalle did them all one better, bringing the figures up off the cards and out into the world.

The idea for the project, which opened in 1998 on an ancient Etruscan site, came to the French American artist in a dream: she would make a sculpture garden in the form of a tarot deck. If life is a game of cards,” she wrote, we are born without knowing the rules. Yet we must play our hand.”