CHRONOLOGY

Birth on the 30th of June 1932, in Montreal, of Alan Frank Glass, second son of Frank Park Glass and Myrtle Palmer

Alan and his brother William, three years his elder, spend every summer at a house on the edge of vast forests and amid orchards on the slopes of Mount Bruno, not far from a golf course where their father worked since its inauguration in 1922.
Their father is the nephew of Willie Park Jr., the renowned golf course architect and leading golf ball and golf club manufacturer of his time. During these years, the children were shuttled back and forth between Montreal and their summer house on Mount Bruno.

The family moves to a house near a lake close to the village of St. Bruno de Montarville. Alan is a strange, solitary and highly sensitive child; he lives in a world where the real and the imaginary are indistinguishable. He possesses a great treasure: one provided by a child’s freedom to create spontaneous associations, the privilege of a still pure mind, a way of perceiving things that will remain with him throughout his life. These years spent in an entirely French-speaking environment will be decisive in the manner in which his future life unfolds.

Another move, to St. Lambert, a small town on the south shore of the
St. Lawrence River on the outskirts of Montreal. 
This change and his enrollment at an English-speaking school are traumatizing; he remains in the first year of primary school three years running, causing his parents concern over a child characterized by teachers as mentally retarded. In reality, the child is dyslexic.

With difficulty he continues his studies at a high-school where he is constantly on the verge of being expelled for insubordination. He is a loner, steering clear of most of his classmates.

He enrolls in evening drawing classes at l’École des Beaux Arts in Montreal.

His father allows him to sit 
for the entrance exam to the É
cole des Beaux Arts on the 
condition that he continues his
 high school education at night.
 At the École des Beaux Arts, he
 is immediatly admited into the 
second year and, after the first
 term, promoted to the third. Upon his 
return the following autumn, 
he enters the fourth year. The students 
point him out: he needed only 
two years to finish the four-year 
program. It seems he has found 
his path.

In early June, he leaves for 
France aboard the Italian
 steamship Homeric; he is only
 19 years old. Upon his arrival in Paris, 
he settles in for the summer at
 the Sphinx, a former brothel
 on boulevard Edgar Quinet and 
visits the Loire region, Normandy 
and Brittany in the company of a
 painter-engraver friend, Solange
 Legendre. He discovers Île
 de Sein. 
In October, he moves to No. 5
rue Manuel, in Montmartre, into 
a garret apartment where he will 
live for ten years.

He enrolls in the École des 
Beaux Arts in Paris where
 he works at the lithography 
studio of Maurice Jaudon, 
at the Sorbonne and takes 
ethnography courses at the 
Musée de l’Homme.
 During winter, he travels to Switzerland, Germany, and Austria, and to Spain and Morocco in the spring.

He works at different jobs in Paris to earn a living. Over the summer, he travels to Greece for the first time, where he visits Mount Athos. He also makes a short trip to Istanbul.

Alan works every night from 9pm to 3am as the receptionist at the Club St. Germain des Prés, rue St. Benoît, where Paris’s smart set comes to hear jazz performed by the era’s best musicians. During these years he produces a series of ballpoint pen drawings.

In September, he travels to Berlin, Dresden, Prague and back to Paris, where he attends every exhibition. At the Étoile Scellée gallery, he leaves his address. A few days later, two youths who frequent surrealist group pay him a visit and, impressed by the drawings pinned on the walls of the room, insist for André Breton to have a look at them. It would be Jacques Sennelier who, one afternoon, takes him to rue Fontaine, where they are received by Breton and his wife Elisa. After giving Alan’s drawings his considered attention, Breton suggests organizing and exhibition with the assistance of Benjamin Péret, at Le Terrain Vague, the gallery of publisher Eric Losfeld, scheduled for January.  He also invites Alan to the group’s meetings at a café on rue Vivienne near the Bourse (stock exchange). Intimidated by group, Alan’s visits to the café will be brief.

From January 8 to January 24, Alan has his first solo exhibit in Paris at Le Terrain Vague.
The vernissage is attended by Breton, Péret, André Pierye de Mandiargues and Matta, who buys one of his drawings.

Final year at the Club St. Germain. He is dismissed for not being a good enough doorman: immersed in his drawings, he denies various celebrities entry to the club while admitting jazz-loving friends and local youths.

He works part-time at the Librairie Espagnole on rue Monsieur le Prince. That same year, at the studio of Yves and Aube Elléouët in Montparnasse, he sees a Mexican sugar skull for the first time.
This extraordinary encounter will lead to his departure a few months later from Barcelona to Mexico, aboard the cargo ship Monte Anaga, of the Aznar shipping company.

In Mexico, he stays with his friends Alexandre and Denise Jodorowsky and in Taxco with his American artist and textile enthusiast, Sheila Hicks. The day of his arrival, Jodorowsky takes him to Leonora Carrington’s place. It will be the beginning of a long lasting friendship. He also introduced to Lilia Carrillo and Manuel Felguérez whom, in turn, will become his great friends.

In June he sets off for Europe again. Two friends, the Japanese artist On Kawara and the actress Bernadette Landru drive him to the port of Veracruz where he boards the Italian freighter Lorenzo Marcello of Sidarma Lines, bound for Marseilles. Among the few passengers is Baroness Irana Frachon, a great traveler who had been the model for Brancusi’s “Muse endormie”, a friend of the singer Yvonne Georges and the surrealist Jacques Rigaud.

He moves into an attic room (servant’s quarters) at No. 9 Sonora Street, where he paints, draws, and produces a series of boxes. At the request of the Spaniard Luis González Robles he collaborates with Manuel Felguérez in putting together a collection of Mexican folk art in preparation for an exhibit to be held at the Casa de las Américas, in Madrid, entitled
Arte popular desde Alaska a la Tierra de Fuego. Early in 1965, he moved to another attic room on 13 de Septiembre Street across from Chapultepec Park, where he prepared an exhibit for Canada scheduled for May. The evening of his departure he is invited to dine at Leonora Carrington’s, where he meets Teeny and Marcel Duchamp.

The Antonio Souza Gallery hosts his first solo exhibit in Mexico City titled Los Relicarios,  from January 26 to February 26.

Receives a grant from the Arts Council of Canada.

Arrives in Paris at the very start of the demonstrations of May 68. In September leaves for India where he will live for a year.
Travels in the subcontinent and Nepal.

Return to Mexico, he moves into a modest apartment at Sinaloa No. 97 where he will live for the next twenty years.

Exhibits in Mexico City and Montreal.
The Musée du Québec and Ottawa’s Art Bank acquired several of his works.

Works and exhibits in Mexico City.

In November and December, he holds his first exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City at the request of Fernando Gamboa, the museum’s director.

Later, the works shown in Mexico are shipped to Canada and exhibited at the Gilles Corbeil Gallery in Montreal.
Pierre de Ligny Boudreau, a friend from his Paris years, then director of the Pierre Matisse Gallery, introduces him to Pierre Matisse, in whose home he will henceforth be warmly welcomed whenever he passes through New York.
One day in his gallery’s warehouse, Pierre Matisse sees Alan enthralled in front of a polychrome statue of Saint Mary Magdalene from the Sainte-Baume in Provence and spontaneously tells him to take it with him. This marvelous piece will remain in New York in Pierre de Ligny Boudreau’s apartment.

Works in Mexico City on drawings, watercolors and, boxes that will later be bought by the Claude Bernard Gallery in New York.
Death of Bridget Tichenor and moves to Tabasco street in the Roma district of Mexico City.

Exhibits at the Claude Bernard Gallery in New York.

Presented by the Claude Bernard Gallery at Chicago’s International Art Fair.

As a member of Mexico’s National System of Art Creators, Alan Glass receives a grant and proceeds to prepare two exhibitions in Mexico.

Exhibition at the Galerie 1900-2000 in Paris from September 12 to October 17.

He is represented by the Claude Bernard Gallery at the Brussels International Art Fair.

Exhibition “El Arcoiris Nocturno” at the López Quiroga Gallery in Mexico City from the 29th of May to the 5th of July and at Oaxaca’s Museum of Contemporary Art from the 18th of October to the 18th of November.

Presented by the Galerie 1900-2000 at ARCO, Madrid.
At the López Quiroga Gallery in Mexico City, from August 20th to September 17th, he exhibits box-objects and a publication entitled La Unidad del Múltiple consisting of 20 numbered engravings, 2 collages, and a poem by Leonora Carrington, in a limited edition of 21 copies.

Takes part in an exhibition in tribute to Joseph Cornell at the Utopia Parkway Gallery in Madrid.
Filming of the documentary on Alan Glass Through A(lan) Glass, by Tufic Makhlouf Akl. (55 minutes in digital format) 2003-2006.

Solo exhibition at Madrid’s Michel Soskine Gallery Inc Gabinete Surrealista, from 31st of May to the 14th of July.

Mexico City’s Museum of Modern Art assembles 150 of his works in a retrospective exhibition 1950-2008, Zurcidos Invisibles, running from November 27th to the 26 of April and curated by Masayo Nonaka.
Publication of Alan Glass’s Scrapbook.

On December 4th, 2012 the publications Alan Glass and Alan Glass Scrapbook are presented at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, completing an
in-depth overview of Alan’s biography and work.

On November 15, 2017, the Ministry of Culture awards him the Bellas Artes medal at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.