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TIMELINE of Charles Dellschau's life. by Tracy Baker White, addendum by Stephen Romano
1830 Charles August Albert Dellschau born in Berlin on June 5. 1834-1835 Rufus Porter publishes plans for two different airships in Mechanic's Magazine. 1830d '40s Aeronauts test-pilot balloon airships all over Germany and other parts of Europe. 18454 Porter builds and successfully flies two hydrogen-filled Aeroports. 1848 Revolutions A Germany; thousands of Germans seeking economic opportunities immigrate to the United States in the ensuing decade. 1848-1855 California Gold Rush. 1849 Rufus Porter publishes a pamphlet entitled Aerial Navigation: The Practicability of Traveling Pleasantly and Safely From New York to California in Three Days. . Dellschau immigrates to the United States, probably arriving at the Port of Galveston, Texas. 1850 Dellschau files a Declaration of Intention in Harris County, Texas. 1852 Henri Giffard builds the world's first navigable passenger airship, driven by a steam engine. 1853 First air balloon flies in Northern California. 1854-1859 Years for which Dellschau claims the Sonora Aero Club existed. Members include neighbors in the boarding house in which he resides. c. 1859-1860 Dellschau returns to Texas and works as a butcher in Richmond, a center of the state's cattle trade. 1860 Dellschau becomes a United States citizen. 1861 Dellschau marries a widow with a five-year-old daughter. The couple goes on to have three children of their own. 1861-1865 American Civil War 1863 Ferdinand Von Zeppelin develops his plan for the zeppelin after visiting the Union Army Balloon Corps. 1863-1865 Dellschau's family is included on the Texas list of Confederate Indigent Families. He signs an Amnesty Oath in 1865. 1873 Dellschau's stepdaughter marries Anton Stelzig, a harness and saddle maker. 1877 Dellschau's wife and only son both die. 1879 Dellschau remarries; his second wife dies within a year. 1884 Dellschau moves to Brenham, Texas, where the Stelzig family has relocated. One of his two daughters disappears from historical records, indicating she may have died. 1887 Dellschau moves with the Stelzigs to Houston and works in his son-in-law's saddlery. 1890 Dellschau moves to Austin to be near his last remaining natural child, who is being treated for tuberculosis. He works as a butcher. 1893 Dellschau's daughter dies in Austin. Anton Stelzig dies in Houston. Dellschau returns to Houston to its with his stepdaughter and work in the saddlery. He eventually lives in back room of the family house, and will live there for the rest of his life. 1896-1897 Mysterious lights reported in the skies over several states in the West and Midwest; newspapers across the nation begin to refer to it as the Great Texas Airship Mystery. 1897 First aluminum airship flies, in Germany. c. 1898 Dellschau begins to write and illustrate memoirs of his time in California; they are completed approximately two years later. An 1898 letter to the editor about a perfect airship design published in the Houston Daily Post inspires a portion of the memoirs.
Letter to the editor by W.H. Brown, The Houston Daily Post, December 6 1898.
The earliest known work by Charles A.A. Dellschau from 1898.
Dellschau's work was in large part a record of the activities of the Sonora Aero Club, of which he was a purported member. Dellschau's writings describe the club as a secret group of flight enthusiasts who met at Sonora, California in the mid-19th century. One of the members had discovered the formula for an anti-gravity fuel he called "NB Gas." Their mission was to design and build the first navigable aircraft using the NB Gas for lift and propulsion. Dellschau called these flying machines Aeros. Dellschau does not claim to be a pilot of any of the airships; he identifies himself only as a draftsman for the Sonora Aero Club. His collages incorporate newspaper clippings (called "press blooms") of then-current news articles about aeronautical advances and disasters. According to a coded story hidden throughout the drawings which made up his notebooks the Sonora Aero Club was a branch of a larger secret society known only as NYMZA. Despite exhaustive research, including searches of census records, voting rosters, and death records, nothing has been found to substantiate the existence of this group except for a few gravestones in the Columbia Cemetery where several of the surnames are found. It is speculated that, like Henry Darger's "Realms of the Unreal", the Sonora Aero Club is most likely a combination of encounters the artist experienced in real life as well as fiction.
1899 The Wright Brothers begin crucial early flight experiments with biplane kites. 1900 The first zeppelin airship flies. c. 1900-1903 Dellschau retires from the Stelzig saddlery. 1903 The Wright Brothers make the first successful flight of a fixed-wing airplane. 1908 Earliest date of work in Dellschau's twelve known hand-bound books of drawings of airships. 1910 The first airplane flight in the state of Texas, in Houston, by French aviator Louis Paulhan. 1921 Date of Dellschau's last known drawing. 1923 Dellschau dies, on April 20, in Houston.
Addendum
c.1960's Dellschau's 12 books of art are thrown into the trash by a caretaker and taken to a dump in Houston TX. They are immediately rescued by a "picker" named Fred Washington who brings them to his "Washington's Trading Post" in Houston, puts them under a tarp and forgets about them.
Fred Washington Sr. at his Trading Post in Houston TX c. 1965
One of the 12 books of drawing by Charles A.A. Dellschau
c. 1968 An intern from the Menil Foundation in Houston TX named Mary Jane Victor discovers the works of Dellschau at Washington's Trading Post and gets Domenic De Menil to acquire 4 Books, an acquisition totaling some 500 drawings enter the Menil collection. 1969 The Menil Foundation organize the exhibition "Flight" which includes for the first time ever the works of Charles Dellschau.
The art of Charles A.A. Dellschau displayed for the first time ever in the exhibtion "Flight", 1969.
Peter Navaro, a local graphic designer and UFO enthusiast sees the works at Menil and is immediately stuck by their possible connection to "The Great Texas Airship Mystery" Over the next few years, Navarro studies the works of Dellschau at both Menil and Washington's Trading Post and ultimately acquires all the remaining books and obsesses over them for the next 20 years. Pete Navaro compiles "The Book Of Dellschau", a 500 page compendium of observations of every known work by Charles Dellschau as well as 15 volumes of field notes on the works of Charles Dellschau.
One of Dellschau's books in Pete Navaro's study c. 1970's
Sample pages from Pete Navaro's extraordinary "Book of Dellschau" and the 15 volume "Field Notes", the most exhaustive and comprehensive study of Dellschau's art to date.
c. 1990's Navarro sells some of the books to the San Antonio Art Association, which later splits up to become the San Antonio Art Museum and the Witte Museum, each taking 2 book with them. c. 1996 a custodian at the Menil Foundation named William Steen acquires the remaining 4 books from Pete Navaro. 1997 William Steen sells 2 of them to Ricco Maresca Gallery in Manhattan. The gallery takes the books apart and frames and sells the individual pages . 1998 Ricco Maresca Gallery introduce the works at the Outsider Art fair 1998, and the artist is given enormous visibility with an article in the New York Times. 1998 First Ever solo exhibition and catalog of the works of Dellschau at Ricco Maresca Gallery in January 1998 "Charles Dellschau: Aeronautical Notebooks" Catalog essay, republished in RAW VISION magazine is written by then gallery intern Lauren Redniss.
1998 - 2006 Charles Dellschau is featured in the following exhibitions:
2002 "Flight or Fancy? The Secret Life of Charles A. A. Dellschau" curated by - San Antonio Museum of Art, Focus Gallery, 2002 2006 Private Art Dealer and former Manager of Ricco Maresca Gallery Stephen Romano acquires all of the remaining works by Dellschau from Ricco Maresca Gallery. 2009 Dennis Crenshaw and Pete Navaro collaborate on the book "THE SECRETS OF DELLSCHAU: The Sonora Aero Club and the Airships of the 1800s, A True Story", published by Anomalist books.
2013 CHARLES DELLSCHAU's first major monograph is produced by Stephen Romano, designed by Marquand books and distributed by DAP. The book which is enthusiastically reviewed contains a major essay on Dellschau by esteemed art writer and cultural anthropologist Thomas McEvilley who had previously written seminal works on Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein, Julian Schanbel and marina Abramovick among others. Other essay are by Tracy Baker White, Roger Cardinal, Curator of Aerospace at the Smithsonian Museum Thomas Crouch, President of the ABCD Collection in Paris Barbara Safarova, and gallerist Randall Morris. An introduction is made by Museum of Everything founder James Brett and acknowledgments are made by Stephen Romano. In a review of the book for RAW VISION magazine, art writer Tom Patterson states that Dellschau is now "widely acknowledged as an outsider master in the same league as Henry Darger, Adolph Wolfli and Martin Ramirez".
2013 Charles Dellschau is featured at the PULSE art fair alongside Henry Darger at Stephen Romano booth and is acknowledged on the front page of The Art Newspaper as the highlight of the fair.
2006 - 2015 Charles Dellschau is featured in the following exhibitions:
"Messages and Magic: Collage and Assemblage in American Art" - John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, 2008
Menil Collection, Houston, TX. "Seeing Stars: Visionary Drawing from the Collection"
"Museum of Everything", Paris, France. 2009 -
"Farfetched", Gregg Art Museum, 2013
OPUS HYPNAGOGIA Morbid Anatomy Museum 2015 Curated by Stephen Romano July - October 2015
"CHARLES DELLSCHAU (1830 - 1923): AMERICAN VISIONARY" Stephen Romano Gallery, New York. Dec 17 Jan 31 2016
The Museum of Old and New, Tasmania. "Museum of Everything" collection June 2016
"Vestiges and Verse" American Folk Art Museum January - May 2018
Scope Art Fair New York 2018.
Chares Dellschau is included in the exhibition "Out Of This World" presented by Gagosian Gallery, curated by Larry Gagosian for the Seatle Art Fair. August 2018. SDellschau is presented alongside some of the recognized names in modern art history.
The exhibition "Charles Dellschau and the Mythology of Flight" curated by historian Brian Chidester is presented at the Brooklyn Antiquarian Book Fair September 7 and 8 2019. Many works in this exhibition will be seen by the public for the very first time, on the 100th anniversary of their creation.
Production begins on the feature lenght film "Wonder Weaver You Will Find Me" by CandleWood Media Collective Productions.
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