Alan Glass at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Canadian artist largely unknown at home but beloved in his adopted country of Mexico

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A wonderful surprise awaited when I entered Mexico City’s opulent Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in November 2024. The arts institution is one of the most beautiful buildings in the Americas. 

But it is also quirky, possessing a graceful, curving Art Nouveau exterior that took so long to build last century that, when it was time to work on the interior, Art Nouveau was passé, so the interior decorators created a sleek, sharp-edged, marble Art Deco temple to the arts. Somehow the competing architectural styles work, albeit quirkily.

Fittingly, the surprise awaiting me was a quirky, jaw-dropping exhibition of art unlike anything I had seen before: Art that was weird, but it worked. The surrealist artist being honoured in this revered location was a Canadian largely unknown in his native land but adored in his adopted home of Mexico. The late Alan Glass abandoned his hometown of Montreal in the 1960s for the bohemian Roma Norte neighbourhood of the Mexican capital and stayed there until his death in 2023. 

The Glass exhibition has now moved to Canada. Worlds of Wonder: The Surrealist Journey of Alan Glass is on view at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts now through Sept. 28, 2025.

Glass is best known for his framed, glass-encased assemblages of painted eggs, small taxidermy birds, honeycombs, lobster claws, pictures of queens past and present and scores of other found objects that tickled the artist’s fancy. Each assemblage is like a quirky poem, often humorous, but always reflective, thoroughly enchanting and perfectly complementing the long tradition of popular, surrealist art in Mexico.

“Glass juxtaposed these objects with the intention of revealing their hidden, lost and forgotten meanings, and subverting their intended purpose,” Mexican curators Xavier de la Riva and Joshua Sanchez wrote in the exhibition catalogue.

Now, will that explanation help you understand the assemblage New Dew, New Honey II, 2008, in which real (but dead) bees crawl out of a honeycomb into the massive skirt of some ancient queen framed by a dozen eggs? Perhaps not, but you can have fun trying to figure it out. Glass declined to discuss his works in detail, inviting viewers to interpret the art as they wanted. So, no answers are wrong.

My first thought upon seeing Glass’s Mexico City retrospective, Chance Find, was that this exhibition should travel to Canada where Glass has been largely forgotten and, frankly, was never known much at home outside of Montreal.

As it turns out, Canada’s ambassador to Mexico at the time, Graeme C. Clark, had the same thought. He got in touch with Stéphane Aquin, director of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and convinced him to take the show.

The result is Worlds of Wonder: The Surrealist Journey of Alan Glass. Aquin has compared Glass’s magical show to the “return of the prodigal son” after a half-century absence from Canada.

There are more than 120 artworks in Worlds of Wonder including the aforementioned assemblages, ink drawings and abstract paintings, including a series of “invisible paintings” which are the palest of watercolour swirls supposedly obscuring images that, in fact, never travelled beyond Glass’s imagination.

Thankfully, there are no invisible assemblages. We see them all. So, we have Ziggurat polar, 1991, a giant ice palace festooned with flags and an enormous rubber glove. Yes, a rubber glove. And then there is the brainteaser Lobster that Pedro Friedeberg sent alive to Alan Glass, 2022, containing a multi-coloured wool sock decorated with parts of a real lobster and suggestions of miniature volleyballs flying through the air. You don’t have to explain these works to enjoy them any more than you have to explain why you enjoy sips of a fine wine. Remember: This is surrealist art; anything goes.

Some of the assemblages in the Mexico show were deemed too fragile to travel. But the Montreal museum had 12 Glass works of its own and put nine of them in the show, exhibiting some of them for the first time, despite owning them for decades.

Glass was born in 1932 in Montreal and attended the Ecole des beaux-arts in that city, studying under the famous artist Alfred Pellan. In 1952, Glass went to Paris and fell under the spell of the godfather of surrealist art, André Breton. In the early 1960s, Glass started travelling to Mexico, settling there in 1963, saying it was the only country to which he truly belonged. There, he developed friendships with other surrealist artists, including Leonora Carrington, a British implant who remains one of Mexico’s favourite visual artists.

Not much has been recorded about Glass’s personal life although he is described as “queer,” in the exhibition catalogue. He tended to keep his private life private, living in extreme poverty for much of his days in a home stuffed with all the exotic bric-a-brac that ended up in his assemblages.

Bellas Artes started preparing the Glass retrospective while the artist was still alive. Unfortunately, he died in 2023, at age 91, a year before the exhibition opened. Although a stranger to most of the Canadian art world, his work can be found in some of the world’s great museums in Paris, New York and Mexico City. His posthumous return to Montreal is an opportunity for Canada to celebrate one of its forgotten, quirky talents. ■

Worlds of Wonder: The Surrealist Journey of Alan Glass is at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from April 17 to Sept. 28, 2025.

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