Charles Dellschau
Charles August Albert Dellschau (4 June 1830 Brandenburg, Prussia – 20 April 1923 Houston, Texas) was a Prussian-American who gained posthumous fame after the discovery of his large scrapbooks that contained drawings, collages and watercolors of airplanes and airships.
In addition to his stepdaughter, Dellschau had three children: two daughters, Bertha and Mary, and a son, Edward, who died in 1877 at age 6.
In 1865 Dellschau signed the Civil War Amnesty Oath, indicating that he was a soldier for the Confederate States Army.
After his retirement in 1899, he lived with his stepdaughter and her husband, and worked in their attic apartment in Houston, Texas,[4] where he filled at least 13 notebooks with drawings, watercolor paintings, and collages depicting fantastical airships.
[9] Dellschau's writings describe the club as a secret group of flight enthusiasts who met in Sonora, California in the mid-19th century.
His collages incorporate newspaper clippings (called "press blooms") of then-current news articles about aeronautical advances and disasters.
It is speculated that, like the voluminous "Realms of the Unreal" notebooks by outsider artist Henry Darger (1882-1973), the Sonora Aero Club is a fiction by Dellschau.
Charles Dellschau's life and art is the subject of a monograph released in the spring of 2013 produced by Marquand Books, Stephen Romano and distributed by Distributed Art Publishers with essays by Thomas McEvilley, Tracy Baker-White, Roger Cardinal, James Brett, Thomas Crouch, Barbara Safarova and Randall Morris.
Dellschau's work shows the influence of circus banner painting, in its use of centralized subjects and ornamental borders, and often possesses a jewel-like quality.
Reviewing the 1998 Ricco Maresca exhibition, the New York Times said: …his images define a fleet of craft that, at their most recognizable, suggest eccentric balloons or dirigibles, or flying carriages, and sometimes include pilots and passengers.
Framed by further stripes, as well as words, names and numbers, the drawings intimate a universe almost as elaborate as Rizzoli's in a style reminiscent of Monty Python.
