inquire for available works at romanostephen@gmail.com

"Circus hued, intricately drafted, these airborn objects are those that arrive in dreams, wheels and pulleys whirring musically, a great dynamo of effort that is belied by the gracefullness of flight. With its title-- Long Cross Cut on Wather on Land and up to the Clouds-- evoking both the engineer and the poet, the above imagioning of an airship and its uniformed crew (there's even a chef, it seems) signals the grandness of Dellschau's vision."

Albert Mobilo, Bookforum.

Charles AA Dellschau (1830 - 1923) Plate 4428 "FALLL RISE"

Monday July 21 1919

"Renaissance paintings show saints and angels floating or flying around amid clouds in the same skies where Dellschau's angelic Aeros are suspended light as a feather"

- Thomas McEvilley, excerpted from "Charles A.A. Dellschau’s Aporetic Archive"

"Dellschau's works are treasures for their aesthetic sensibility. He's given us a visual expression of a time when the world realized that man might soon ascend beyond the terrestrial domain."

- Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic

Charles AA Dellschau (1830 - 1923) Plate 4332 "HAS BIN"

March 17 1919

"Embracing the childlike need to believe in magic, Dellschau’s work reminds us that there is magic in the universe."

- Antiques and the Arts Weekly

In the fall of 1899, Charles A.A. Dellschau (1830–1923), a retired butcher and who later worked in the Stelzig family saddlery business in Houston, embarked on a project that would occupy him for more than 20 years. What began as an illustrated manuscript recounting his experiences in the California Gold Rush became an obsessive project resulting in 12 large, hand-bound books with more than 2,500 drawings related to airships and the development of flight. Dellschau’s designs resemble traditional hot air balloons augmented with fantastic visual details, collage and text. The hand-drawn “Aeros” were interspersed with collaged pages called “Press Blooms,” featuring thousands of newspaper clippings related to the political events and technological advances of the period.

After the artist’s death in 1923, the books were stored in the attic of the family home in Houston. In the aftermath of a fire in the 1960s, they were dumped on the sidewalk and salvaged by a junk dealer. Eight made their way into the collections of the San Antonio Museum of Art, the Witte Museum and the Menil Collection; the remainder were sold to a private collector. Dellschau’s works have since been collected by numerous other museums including the American Folk Art Museum, the High Museum, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Like the eccentric outpourings of Adolf Wölfli, Henry Darger and Achilles Rizzoli, these private works were not created for the art world, but to satisfy a driving internal creative force. Dreamer, optimist and visionary, Charles Dellschau is one of the earliest documented outsider artists known in America.

NEWS

CHARLES AA DELLSCHAU FEATURED IN

"SUPERNATURAL AMERICA:

THE PARANORMAL IN AMERICAN ART"

CURATED BY ROBERT COZZOLINO

June 12 – September 5, 2021: Toledo Museum of Art

October 7, 2021 – January 2, 202 at the : Toledo Art Museum

February 19 – May 15, 2022: Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky

February 19, 2022 - May 15, 2022 Minneapolis Institute of Art

BRUNO DECHARME, PRESIDENT OF ABCD ART BRUT, DONATES ENTIRE VOLUME OF PAINTINGS BY CHARLES DELLSCHAU TO CENTRE POMPIDOU (PARIS) PERMANENT COLLECTION.

THESE WERE THE LAST WORK DELLSCHAU MADE.

Included in the exhibtion "SAISON ll - le BRI-COLAGE"

"The space dedicated to this donation, with a selection of works that changes every 6 months, invites us this time to discover the universe of different creators whose practice, under the sign of recycling, maintains a decisive dialogue with the material, transforming the concept of do-it-yourself (bricolage) into that of "bri-colage" according to the expression of the psychiatrist Jean Oury."

Charles Dellschau and the Mythology of Flight (An Art Exhibition) from Full Moon Films on Vimeo.

Charles Dellschau's Aero's soar to unimaginable new heights !

Stephen Romano Gallery is thrilled to announce that the art of Charles A.A. Dellschau is included in the exhibition "Out of This World: Artists Explore Space", curated by Larry Gagosian for the 2018 Seattle Art Fair's Gagosian Gallery booth, courtesy of Stephen Romano Gallery.

"As the first publication to devote serious attention to his art, this new, weightier volume is indispensable for collectors, scholars and others with a special interest in Dellschau and/or a broader interest in outsider art."

– Tom Patterson, Raw Vision

Charles Dellschau 1830 - 1923 with text by Stephen Romano, Thomas McEvilley, Roger Cardinal, James Brett, Thomas D. Crouch, Barbara Safarova, Randall Morris, Tracy Baker-White.

Dreamer, optimist and visionary, Charles Dellschau (1830-1923) is one of the earliest documented self taught artists known in America. What began as an illustrated manuscript recounting his experiences in the California Gold Rush became an obsessive project resulting in twelve large, hand-bound books with more than 2500 drawings related to airships and the development of flight.

This first monograph on Dellschau includes an essay by esteamed art writer Thomas McEvilley, a biographical overview by Tracy Baker-White, and texts by Roger Cardinal of the University of Kent, James Brett of the Museum of Everything in London, Tom Crouch of the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Air and Space, president of the ABCD Art Brut collection in Paris Barbara Safarova and writer and New York gallerist Randall Morris.