Tarot de Louttre B - 1981 - HIGHLY COLLECTIBLE DECK - Very Hard to Find Tarot

Complete in its original stylized box - 114.5 x 85.5 cm -
Booklet included.
Cards are very in good condition. Box is showing signs of wear and few tears due to storage and time as pictured.

An extremely rare piece for collectors & connoisseurs.

Louttre B is the pseudonym of the French painter Marc-Antoine Bissiere (1926-2012). The deck was published in 1981 by Musee des Arts Decoratifs in cooperation with Grimaud on the opening of an exhibition called "Antique Playing Cards - A Collectors Dream".

The cards originally were part of a book called "Le Tarot des familles", which was printed in a limited edition of only 75 copies. The book contains hand painted engravings of the cards with explanations.

The Tarot de Louttre B shows no human figures, but only the objects taken from Tarot de Marseilles. The images of this deck play with symmetry in various aspects. The three cards, where the symmetry of Roman numbers allows it, have mirror-inverted images. That leads to the first impression, that both The Emperor and The Lovers have number VI and Sun and Fool both have number XXI. La Force (Strength) has no explicit number, but the number XI is part of the image.

Card titles are in French. The suits are d'Epee, Baton, Coupe, and Deniers. The courts are Valet, Cavalier, Reine, and Roi.  The backs are reversible. The 78 cards plus titlecard and a French only lwb came in a lidded cardboard box.

Rachel Pollack reviews this deck in her book of deck reviews, "The New Tarot" (Overlook Press, 1990), in fact it's the first review in the book. I'll quote a few sentences:

"In 24 October 1981, the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris opened an exhibition titled 'cartes a jouer anciennes, un reve de collectionneurs.' As part of the exhibition they commissioned this highly original Tarot deck from M. Louttre B. The style of this deck is impressionistic, deliberately rough, with a sense of incompleteness, the picture seeming to emerge half finished."

"The deck [...] is not occult, at least not in the sense of a developed language of symbolism. It characteristically reduces any particular card to its essentials, which it then presents in a crude, almost childlike way."

"The sparseness in the deck makes the details constantly suggestive."

"In its deliberate crudeness the Tarot de Louttre creates an opposite pole from so many modern Tarots, with their emphasis on complexity. And yet, those crude and amusing images can lead us into subtle meanings."

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