Bookmark – Worlds of Wonder: The Surrealist Journey of Alan Glass

“Each artwork reads as a visual prayer — an ode to imagination and to the mystery of the invisible.”

by

BOOKS

Couverture-Alan Galss.jpg

Title: Worlds of Wonder: The Surrealist Journey of Alan Glass

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Art & Architecture

March 2025

978-2-89192-453-5

Long a ghostly presence on the margins of Canadian art history, Alan Glass (1932–2023) rarely exhibited in Canada, and his name is absent from standard textbooks. 

But that’s finally beginning to change. 

Worlds of Wonder: The Surrealist Journey of Alan Glass — his first solo museum show and first retrospective in Canada, now on view at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts — has thrust him into the national spotlight like a long-overdue shooting star. 

And now, as the exhibition nears its close on Sept. 28, his newly devoted admirers, myself included, must content ourselves with the show’s richly illustrated catalogue.

Worlds of Wonder: The Surrealist Journey of Alan Glass is a bilingual exhibition catalogue produced and edited by the publishing department of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Featuring essays by both Canadian and Mexican curators, the publication accompanies two major retrospectives of Glass’s work: the first at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City last year, and the second at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

While no printed page can replace Glass’s tactile assemblages — composed of dime-store trinkets and flea-market curios — the intimacy of his work translates surprisingly well to the page, inviting us to curl up with the book and wander through its intricate dreamscapes.

Like his art, Alan Glass was an enigmatic figure. He never sought the artistic spotlight and remained guarded about his private life. Although deeply connected to the émigré community of European Surrealists in Mexico City, where he lived for more than 60 years, Glass led a solitary life and seemed to inhabit the worlds he created more fully than the one around him. 

As he confided in a letter to a friend, quoted in the exhibition catalogue: “My life is not a success according to the values of the times we are living in, but in spite of the problems, anxieties and constant worries, I have simultaneously had access to perceptions and states of mind that seem to me an invaluable compensation.”

His art attests to the extraordinary richness of that inner world. From the wry humour of No Problem, where a wounded, dying Earth is clumsily bandaged, as if by an incompetent nurse, to his more metaphysical meditations, Glass invites viewers into mysterious realms that span the full kaleidoscope of human experience.

As Kristoffer Noheden observes in one of the catalogue’s insightful essays, Vertical Cartography: Navigation by Stars and Spirit, among all of Glass’s recurring motifs, it is map-making and navigation that he “infuses with a spiritual dimension,” transforming familiar terrains into works of metaphysical poetry.

Noheden also highlights the profound influence of Glass’s favourite author, Henry Corbin — a theologian and scholar of Islamic mysticism who believed that imagination is the bridge to spiritual truth. In his seminal work Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ’Arabi, Corbin wrote, “Prayer is the highest form, the supreme act of the Creative Imagination.”

In many ways, the inverse of that statement captures my experience — and perhaps that of others — when contemplating the more than 130 large-scale images in this catalogue. Each artwork reads as a visual prayer — an ode to imagination and to the mystery of the invisible. ■

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