An evening dedicated exclusively to Alan Glass, attended by representatives of his estate, will take place at our gallery on September 17 at the end of the day. More details to come!
To mark the beginning of a new collaboration between our gallery and the estate of Alan Glass, we are presenting 16 drawings from his Paris period (1954–1962). In them he explored organic forms and hybrid figures, demonstrating his fascination with detail and accumulation. The use of ballpoint pen gives the works a remarkable graphic density.
Presentation
An alumnus of Montréal’s École des beaux arts, where he had a brilliant mentor in the person of Alfred Pellan, Alan Glass was awarded a scholarship allowing him to settle in Paris in early 1952. It was in the vibrant capital, with its mix of jazz and intellectual ferment, that he began a unique artistic endeavour, adopting the recently invented ballpoint pen in 1954 as his instrument of choice for creating “automatic drawings.”
During the day, Glass educated himself in the fine arts, while also taking courses in ethnography and lithography; at night, he was a doorman at the iconic Club Saint Germain des Prés, turning from his blank sheets to the wafts of Calvados carried along with the notes of Lester Young, but never letting go of his Bic. He developed almost mediumistic works packed with an abundance of labyrinthian, interlacing patterns and organic volutes, animals, faces, blurred structures emerging from a continuous, uninterrupted line achieved without lifting the tip of his pen. Lodging in a garret located at 5, Rue Manuel in the 9th Arrondissement, near the Musée Gustave Moreau, enabled him to visit its galleries multiple times. Indeed, some of his drawings are reminiscent of the dreamlike compositions, as well as intricate arabesques and other motifs, of Symbolist works.
In the meantime, his drawings came to captivate Surrealist luminaries. In 1957, he met André Breton and Benjamin Péret, who in his works saw the purest expression of automatic drawing, intended “to move faster than consciousness.” In January 1958, their enthusiasm led to his first solo show at the gallery Le Terrain Vague, a Mecca of the Surrealist movement founded by publisher Éric Losfeld and frequented by the era’s intellectual elite. Under the kind sponsorship of Surrealism’s leading lights, the exhibition presented works by Glass that mainly consisted of the automatic drawings executed in ballpoint pen. Translating the fertility of the unconscious with oneiric precision, those drawings were immediately hailed as revelatory.
Throughout his eight years in Paris, Glass travelled all over Europe visiting antiques markets in Hungary, Greece, Poland and what was then Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, collecting painted Easter eggs and other various vernacular objects, souvenirs of worlds both strange and familiar. While his boxed assemblages lead toward his maturity as an artist, it is in his ballpoint drawings that the quintessence of his art is revealed: a space of freedom in which gracefully adroit Surrealist gesture is rooted in the primal impulse of creation.
Leaving Paris for Mexico after 1962, Glass entrusted about 300 of those drawings to Québec artist Micheline Beauchemin. They remained in her possession and, following her death, forgotten within her estate. Finding them in a barn in Grondines, Québec, Beauchemin’s heir, Jean-Paul Paré, got in touch with Alan Glass, who was then living in Mexico. Reuniting with them in 2021 was a major emotional rebirth for Glass, an opportunity for reconnecting with the origins of his creativity.
The drawings are now the subject of a catalogue, Drawings, Alan Glass: Paris 1954–1962, published in 2024. Furthermore, the retrospective exhibition devoted to his work held in 2024–2025, first at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City and then at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art has re-established his place in the history of Canadian and international contemporary art.
This group of drawings bears witness to a long-overlooked, yet formative period in the artist’s career, the true genesis of his Surrealist practice, shedding light on his later developments, particularly the assemblages, and giving rise to a prodigiously sophisticated graphic universe that is at once vegetal, animal, human, and cosmic—visual poetry crafted by the unconscious.
Alan Glass died in Mexico City on January 16, 2023.
