- For a direct link to the story or http://www.houstonpress.com to see the frontpage with the headline. And
last, but not least: Do visit the Ricco/Maresca Gallery's page at http://www2.awa.com/artnet/artnetweb/rmgallery/dell/index.html to experience a small selection of Dellschau's
paintings! The text is featured after the New Times article.
-
- ___________________
-
- Secrets of the Sonora Aero Club By Cynthia
Greenwood 12-10-98
-
- A turn-of-the-century tale of UFOs, cracking
some code, art collectors and mysterious airship sightings in Southwest
skies
-
- ***
-
- In 1899, Charles Dellschau, a grouchy
retired butcher, began to paint amazing airships. His intricate collages
show shiplike decks supported by striped balloon pontoons; they show bright-colored
helicopters and evil-looking striped dirigibles outfitted for war; they
show crews of dapper little gentlemen accompanied by the occasional cat.
Many pages are bedecked with little newspaper clippings about aviation,
and text in his weird Germanic lettering celebrates the pure, unexcelled
marvelousness of the flying machines.
-
- Nearly a century later, folk-art collectors
hold the works in high esteem. A page from Dellschau's notebooks can fetch
as much as $15,000, a hefty price even in a booming market. A New York
Times reviewer said that Dellschau possesses "a charming style that
presages Monty Python"; the Village Voice called the works "sweetly
bizarre."
-
- It's hard to say what the old man would
have made of such praise; he doesn't seem to have thought of himself as
an artist. It's not clear even whether he intended the notebooks for anyone's
eyes but his own. The drawings are crudely sewn together with shoelaces
and thread, and newsprint is glued on the edge of each leaf as a spine.
Watercolor airships occupy both sides of the pages.
-
- Taken at face value, Dellschau's collages
document the feats of the Sonora Aero Club, a secretive group dedicated
to the creation of "aeros," or flying machines. In code, and
bad spelling in both English and German, Dellschau recounted how, in his
youth 50 years before, he and fellow club members gleefully ruled the skies
of Gold Rush California, piloting fantastical airships of their own invention.
-
- Perhaps the notebooks' tales were merely
fictions, Dellschau's efforts to entertain himself. Perhaps the old man
had grown a tad deranged. Or perhaps Dellschau was actually recounting
the exploits of his youth, embellishing here and there, but remaining somewhat
faithful to the facts. Oddly, that last supposition -- the strangest possibility
of all -- seems the most likely. One line of thought even ties the Sonora
club to a rash of UFOsightings.
-
- But untangling Dellschau's tale is a
complicated matter, one that involves penetrating many levels of secrecy,
including that of the very people trying to solve his riddles.
-
- The puzzle of Dellschau's aeros intrigues
both art historians and UFO enthusiasts. Not surprising, most of the hard
facts come from the art world.
-
- Two years ago, William Steen, a mild-mannered
frame designer at the Menil Collection, pieced together documents indicating
the sketchy official outlines of Dellschau's life. Steen modestly claims
to be no scholar, but his four-sheet chronology of Dellschau's life provides
the most reliable biography available.
-
- Steen found the immigration record that
shows Dellschau's 1853 arrival in the United States. The young immigrant
told officials that he was 25 years old; had been born in Brandenburg,
Prussia; traveled here from Hamburg and listed his occupation as a farmer.
-
- Steen uncovered Dellschau's letter of
citizenship, which traces his whereabouts to Harris County in 1856 and
Fort Bend County in 1860. Between those years, the historical documents
are silent about Dellschau's whereabouts. And it's precisely during that
gap that Dellschau claims the Sonora club's exploits took place. So far,
Steen has not been able to locate documents showing that Dellschau even
lived in California in the 1850s. Nor do there seem to be credible reports
of unidentified flying objects in the area. Dellschau rendered some comments
in code. Apparently, whatever it was that he had to say was too private
for his own notebooks.
-
- But where the historical records are
silent, the artist's notebooks make noisy, extravagant claims. Dellschau
represents himself as the club's draftsman and scribe, rather than as one
of its inventors or fliers; he never draws himself aboard an aero. He illustrates
a remarkable number of designs -- maybe as many as 100 -- for airships
with names such as Aero Mio, Aero Trump, Aero Schnabel and Aero Mary. (There's
even an Aero Jourdan.) All were powered by a secret formula that Dellschau
called both "supe" and "suppe"; it could both negate
gravity and drive the ships' wheels, side paddles and compressor motors.
-
- One drawing tells the story of Adolf
Goetz's Aero Goeit, recklessly commandeered by an unskilled pilot; the
airship got tangled in a Sequoia tree, and the interloper died of a broken
neck. Another cautionary tale involves Jacob Mischer, a pilot who went
down in flames in the Aero Gander; Dellschau hints that he was sabotaged
by other club members, who suspected him of using the aircraft to make
money by hauling cargo.
-
- But most of the airships' flights were
safe -- and great fun. Dellschau depicts his aviators enjoying hot breakfasts,
and delights in enumerating the ships' clever gadgets. He often bedecked
his watercolor paintings with little press clippings -- from Scientific
American, the Houston Chronicle and an unidentified German-language newspaper
-- that recount air disasters; Dellschau called them "press blooms."
Against paintings of the Sonora club's successes, the clippings seem intended
as an ironic counterpoint.
-
- (Image text: William Steen, of the Menil,
is fascinated by the notebooks: "The more details I see about Dellschau,
the more convinced I am that a great deal of it is highly possible.")
-
- Dellschau never seems to explain why
the club worked so hard to protect its secrecy, but he shows the members
going to great lengths to do so. By day, the Aero Goeit was disguised as
a gypsy wagon, so it could travel open roads undetected. Dellschau writes
that a club member was banned from developing a machine because he'd talked
to outsiders. And of course, even years after the club disbanded, many
of Dellschau's own comments are rendered in code. Apparently, whatever
it was that he had to say was too private even for his own notebooks.
-
- Often the drawings show the heroic Peter
Mennis, pilot of the Aero Goose and creator of the near-magical suppe.
According to Dellschau's notebooks, Mennis died in the 1860s, and without
his secret formula, the club could fly no longer and was forced to disband.
In picture after picture, Dellschau laments Mennis's demise. "Peter
Mennis you are not forgotten," he writes in one; in another, "no
more suppe."
-
- Could such wonders have happened? It's
a difficult question. If the club were as secretive as Dellschau indicates,
the California desert offered privacy. Sonora was a Gold Rush boomtown,
six miles south of Columbia, now the site of the Columbia Airport. The
airport's land is isolated and flat -- ideal for testing aircraft -- and
is surrounded by mostly hilly terrain.
-
- Dellschau's drawings show equipment that
would have been revolutionary for the 1850s: gliding keels, revolving generators
powered by a chemical reaction, bendable rubber joints, revolving shear
blades, even a retractable landing gear. It was heady stuff, highly advanced
given the state of technology (the Wright Brothers didn't make their famous
flight until 1903). But half a century later, when the old man actually
made the drawings, many of those technologies had grown closer to reality.
-
- The historical record of Dellschau picks
up again in 1861. A certificate from that year shows that Dellschau married
Antonia Hilt, a widow with a four-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. It's not
clear where Dellschau met and married her or where the family first lived
together.
-
- (Image text: The Houston Daily Post described
the airship -- a 30-foot-long skiff-shaped contraption outfitted with revolving
wheels and sails.)
-
- In 1865, they were living in Richmond,
Texas, a haven for newly arrived Germans and Czechs. That year, Dellschau
signed an amnesty oath, swearing that as a former member of the Confederacy,
he wouldn't oppose the U.S. laws that freed slaves. (W.M. Von-Maszewski,
the Texas historian who translated Dellschau's journals, thinks he may
have worked under the Confederates as a civilian.) According to that oath,
Dellschau was a butcher. His height was five feet three inches; his hair,
auburn; eyes, hazel; and complexion, fair. The one verifiable photo of
Dellschau bears out that description and shows him to be a bit gruff and
Teutonic, with a large, round forehead beneath a line of receding hair
and with bushy eyebrows and a moustache that covers his mouth.
-
- Dellschau's wife, Antonia, bore him three
children. In 1877, tragedy struck: Antonia died, and their six-year-old
son, Edward, died two weeks later. Census records show that Dellschau remained
in Richmond for a while afterward with his daughter Bertha.
-
- In 1889, the phone directory lists both
Dellschau and Bertha in Houston, living with Dellschau's stepdaughter,
Elizabeth, and her husband, Anton Stelzig, a harness- and saddle-maker
and the founder of the Western clothing store that still exists in Houston.
-
- (Image text: Pete Navarro links the Sonora
Aero Club to UFO sightings, many of them in Texas, at the turn of the century.)
-
- Sometime before 1892, Dellschau's daughter
Bertha was diagnosed with tuberculosis and was institutionalized. By 1898,
the sanatorium wrote Dellschau that she wouldn't live much longer.
-
- For a few years after moving to Houston,
Dellschau worked as a salesman and clerk for Stelzig's saddlery and harness
business on Main Street, between Congress and Franklin. But the aging butcher
-- in his late 50s when he moved to Houston -- never mastered work in a
service industry. "They sent him home," says Leo Stelzig Jr.,
Anton's grandson. "He was kind of abrupt and wasn't smooth with the
customers."
-
- It was then that Dellschau began to fill
his days by filling his notebooks. He wrote a two-part, 200-page journal
and produced roughly 5,000 ink-and-watercolor drawings before his death
in 1923. By Steen's calculation, that works out to the furious rate of
a drawing every day or two. "He had something to say," Steen
concludes. "The most important thing in his life was his work."
-
- Leo Stelzig Jr. was two years old when
Dellschau died and, as a boy, used to rummage through the attic looking
for old letters whose stamps could grace his collection. In the process,
he came across Dellschau's belongings and marveled at the bizarre aeros.
-
- Dellschau's notebooks languished in the
attic until sometime in the 1960s. According to Steen's search of public
records, the fire department found the house a fire hazard and ordered
that it be cleared of debris. A nurse who'd been hired to care for Anton
Stelzig's two aging sisters attacked the job zealously and in the process
consigned many of the Stelzigs' valuables to a trash heap on the curb.
Among the losses were old World War I uniforms, some very old records and
-- worst of all -- Dellschau's notebooks. Now 74, Leo Stelzig shakes his
head sadly as he recounts the nurse's words: "I took care of that
mess and cleaned it all up."
-
- At the Washington Street dump, an unidentified
trash man sold the notebooks to junk man Fred Washington for $100. Washington
took them to his O.K. Trading Center on Washington Avenue, where they lay
stacked on the floor, covered with a tarp because the building's roof leaked.
-
- In 1969, Mary Jane Victor was an art
history student at the University of St. Thomas -- and a regular patron
of the O.K. Trading Center. She remembers being amazed to come across the
scrapbooks.
-
- At the university art department, Victor
was working for art patron Dominique de Menil, a Schlumberger heiress famous
for her eye for surrealists and the primitive art that inspired them. Victor
promptly told de Menil about her find and put her in touch with the junk
dealer. Soon after, the heiress paid Washington $1,500 for four of the
earliest notebooks.
-
- (Image text: Leo Stelzig Jr. says his
family found that Dellschau wasn't cut out for retail: "He was kind
of abrupt and wasn't smooth with the customers.")
-
- "Dellschau for her was an eccentric,"
recalls Steen. "She had a wonderful affinity for eccentrics."
Half joking, she told Steen she was especially drawn to the coded phrase
"DM=XØ" scrawled across the top of many drawings. She
thought DM stood for "Dominique de Menil." And the rest somehow
equaled her own death.
-
- Soon after de Menil acquired the notebooks,
she exhibited some of their leaves in "Flight," a University
of St. Thomas show on the subject. And it was there that Pete Navarro,
one of the most dogged investigators of Dellschau's mysteries, first encountered
the aeros.
-
- Navarro, a Houston commercial artist,
was intrigued by UFOs, especially by a mysterious rash of airship sightings
near the turn of the century, not long before Dellschau began his drawings.
Navarro read about the St. Thomas exhibition one morning at the breakfast
table. And when he saw Dellschau's drawings, he felt there had to be a
connection to the sightings.
-
- Ufologists believe that between November
1896 and April 1897, thousands of Americans in 18 states between California
and Indiana saw a curious dirigible-like flying machine floating eastward.
No physical evidence of a ship or a designer has ever surfaced, but newspapers
such as the New York Times, Dallas Morning News, San Antonio Daily Express
and Chicago Tribune devoted space to the sightings. In this century, authors
Daniel Cohen and William Chariton have published books on the subject.
-
- The mysterious craft was first spotted
on November 17, 1896, by R.L. Lowery, near a brewery in Sacramento, California.
According to various newspaper reports, the craft seemed to travel eastward.
In spring, it was spotted in Texas.
-
- At 1:16 a.m. on April 17, 1897, the Reverend
J.W. Smith saw what he thought was a shooting star in the night sky of
Childress, Texas, then decided it was really a flying machine. Eventually
he recognized it as the much-discussed cigar-shaped airship.
-
- Four days after Smith's UFO sighting,
the Houston Daily Post gave a lengthy account of his and other spottings
of the same airship, a 30-foot-long skiff-shaped contraption outfitted
with revolving wheels and sails.
-
- Jim Nelson, a farmer from Atlanta, Texas,
recalled glimmers of red, green and blue lights and "a glaring gleam
of white light" that shone directly in front of the airship. In Belton,
a crowd witnessed the same vehicle the next night. They claimed its pilots
spoke loudly as they flew overhead, but the ship's velocity was so great,
their words were lost in the wind.
-
- According to other newspaper accounts,
witnesses managed to talk with the pilots. Sometimes townspeople even came
upon the crew members, who were apparently making repairs to their marvelous
machine and were willing to chat.
-
- In 1972, three years after de Menil bought
her four notebooks, Pete Navarro learned that more Dellschau notebooks
were collecting dust at Washington's junk shop. Nobody wanted them, so
Navarro gave the dealer $65 for one book. Hooked by what he saw, he returned
and offered $500 more for the remaining seven.
-
- Navarro tried to sell four of the notebooks
to de Menil; she chose not to buy them -- perhaps because she liked the
work in her own notebooks better. De Menil owned some of Dellschau's earliest
notebooks and believed that they included his best work. As the artist
aged, his works grew looser, more expressionistic; de Menil seems to have
preferred his earlier precision.
-
- But for Navarro, the notebooks weren't
about artistic quality; they were pieces of a historical puzzle. He visited
Helen and Tommy Britton, cousins of Leo Jr. Helen promised she'd try to
find more books and pictures of Dellschau that were hidden around the family's
old house, but she died before she could locate anything. Navarro also
talked to Tommy Britton, who was a preteen when Dellschau died. Now in
his 80s, he may be the last living relative who remembers Dellschau. (Britton
couldn't be reached for this story.)
-
- After culling a vast number of such press
clippings, Navarro created an elaborate map of every Texas sighting and
wrote several papers. Some are on file at the Houston Public Library's
Texas archive; others are available on the Internet at www.keelynet.com.
In "The Mysterious Mr. Wilson and the Books of Dellschau," co-written
with UFO enthusiast Jimmy Ward, Navarro posits a connection between Dellschau's
clandestine society and a mysterious pilot named Hiram Wilson mentioned
in an article by the San Antonio Daily Express on April 26, 1897, about
a local airship sighting. The article identifies the airship's occupants
as Wilson, from Goshen, New York; his father, Willard H. Wilson, assistant
master mechanic of the New York Central Railroad; and their co-pilot C.J.
Walsh, an electrical engineer from San Francisco.
-
- In that story, Hiram Wilson divulged
to witnesses that his airship design came from an uncle. Navarro believes
that the uncle could have been another Wilson -- the Sonora club member
Tosh Wilson mentioned in one of Dellschau's watercolors. According to Navarro,
Dellschau's coded messages say that Tosh searched seven years to rediscover
suppe, the lost fuel, and finally succeeded.
-
- Navarro has found no trace of a Hiram
Wilson residing in Goshen. But he does offer evidence of his presence at
1897 airship sightings in Greenville, Texas (on April 16); near Lake Charles,
Louisiana (on April 19); near Beaumont, Texas (April 19); Uvalde, Texas
(April 20); Lacoste, Texas (April 24); and Eagle Pass, Texas (April 24).
-
- On April 28, the Galveston Daily News
ran the headline "Airship Inventor Wilson." The article reported
the inventor's encounter with one Captain Akers, a customs agent from Eagle
Pass. Akers told the newspaper that Wilson "was a finely educated
man about 24 years of age and seemed to have money with which to prosecute
his investigations."
-
- Based on such reports, Navarro proposes
several scenarios. Perhaps the ship spotted near San Antonio had been flown
by both Hiram and Willard Wilson. Or perhaps each pilot was steering his
own airship across Texas. (This would explain why witnesses living a distance
from one another offered simultaneous sightings of a man who identified
himself as Wilson.) Navarro also speculates that one of these Wilsons was
the same Tosh Wilson who had once belonged to the Sonora Aero Club. In
that scenario, Tosh would have been reliving the glory days Dellschau could
only illustrate in his notebooks.
-
- To confirm the aero club's activities,
Navarro has traveled to Sonora, talked to historians, searched the newspapers
and even visited all the cemeteries. He found nothing. At times, he says,
he couldn't help thinking that Dellschau made everything up.
-
- Eventually, whether the Sonora club was
a dream or real stopped mattering to Navarro. One day, he remembers being
absorbed by a passage inscribed in one of the drawings: "Wonder Weaver,
you will unriddle my writings." Navarro grew convinced that he and
his brother, Rudy, "were weaving wonders." He says of Dellschau,
"Maybe we had similar minds."
-
- To crack Dellschau's 40-symbol code,
Navarro enlisted the help of his brother, Rudy, and a couple who spoke
German. He says the effort took only one month, but he won't release the
key or a literal translation.
-
- Navarro will talk only about the same
phrase that enchanted de Menil: "DM=XØ." To Navarro, it
stands for "NYMZA," an acronym for a secret society that controlled
the Sonora club's doings. Based on Navarro's papers, some ufologists have
speculated that NYMZA was controlled by -- what else? -- aliens; Navarro
doesn't buy that theory.
-
- Navarro explains that he's saving his
best stuff for his collaborator, Dennis Crenshaw, who's writing a book
called The Secrets of Dellschau. But Steen, at the Menil, isn't convinced
that Navarro really deciphered the symbols. Steen once asked Navarro to
translate the code; Navarro would tell him the meaning of only a couple
of sentences.
-
- Navarro is clearly torn between showing
off and keeping secrets. He's compiled a voluminous scrapbook titled "Dellschau's
Aeros." He proudly showed it to me. It's full of wild code translations
and weird exegeses on the aeros and oddments that Dellschau just stuffed,
unbound, in the notebooks: cartoons, a photocopy of Dellschau's marriage
certificate, letters, maps, clippings and more clippings about all manner
of harebrained inventions. There's even a picture of Otto, Bavaria's Mad
Monarch.
-
- But Navarro won't take his hands off
the scrapbook. It, too, contains secrets, truths and tidbits linking Dellschau's
club with the airship mystery. And for the moment, Navarro wants to keep
the secrets for himself.
-
- Slowly, though, other of Dellschau's
secrets are revealing themselves. In early December, I asked Charles Stelzig
-- Leo's son -- if his father had any of Dellschau's stuff. Charles turned
up a boxful. He and I were the first to go through them since Leo Jr.'s
stamp-collecting days. We found souvenir pictures of famous Germans; one
shows Wilhelm, Kaiser of Deutschland.
-
- And we found letters. Some, postmarked
"Germany," are from a woman named Mary Sprengel. Another one
is from Bertha Dellschau, written from the sanatorium. It begins, "Dear
Papa."
-
- The box also held two antique photo albums
crumbling at the touch. Many of the photos show the logos of Berlin photographers.
Are they from long-lost relatives writing to Charles, long after Prussia
became part of united Germany? Another picture shows Mary Dellschau, the
artist's daughter. And there are photos of young men, any one of whom could
be Dellschau himself.
-
- We found more. A yellowed legal certificate
in German script bears the signatures of Friederike Wilhelmine and Heinrich
Adolphe Dellschau, Charles's parents. In the middle of the page, they've
written "Carl August Albert." Dated June 5, 1830, the document
appears to be the artist's birth certificate.
-
- Other discoveries offered keys to Dellschau's
work. Two receipts, dated 1888 and 1889, showed Dellschau's payments to
the New Orleans German Gazette. Until now, no one has known which German-language
newspaper he used in his collages; surely this is it.
-
- Last, more clippings surfaced. All are
about inventions and cut in perfect squares like Dellschau's "press
blooms." The most revealing boasts of "The Secret of the Keeley
Motor." The article describes a force oddly reminiscent of suppe,
Dellschau's miracle airship fuel.
-
- The Menil Collection still holds the
four notebooks de Menil bought and, in fact, showed them this fall, part
of a show of the de Menils' collection of folk art. Most of the time, though,
the books sit locked in a humidity-controlled room upstairs, individually
tucked in flat boxes.
-
- Museum authorities plan someday to hire
a scholarly biographer to study Dellschau. In the meantime, William Steen
continues to unearth new pieces of information. He's now examining clues
about the lives of Dellschau's daughters, Bertha and Mary.
-
- And in January, Steen plans a side trip
to Sonora after retrieving some Menil-owned Picassos on loan in a San Francisco
exhibit. He hopes to get a feel for the Gold Rush era and perhaps even
to uncover traces of the club's members.
-
- Recently he had Dellschau's journals
translated from German into English. Their 200 pages feature stories about
members of the Sonora Aero Club, with very few illustrations. In these
tales, Dellschau mentions a boarding house, complete with bar and dining
room, where he and club buddies stayed.
-
- Something about the tales nags at Steen.
"The more details I see about Dellschau, the more convinced I am that
a great deal of it is highly possible," he says. "Even though
it's fantastic, it's more than just fairy tales."
-
- As for Pete Navarro, after trying to
unravel the artist's secrets for 25 years, he still has the dreamy-eyed
look of someone possessed by a riddle. Over the years, he's sold all his
Dellschau notebooks because he needed the cash. Four went to the San Antonio
Museum Association in 1972 and are shared between the Witte and San Antonio
Museum of Art. Two years ago, Navarro sold his remaining four to the Ricco/Maresca
Art Gallery in Manhattan.
-
- Those notebooks hold the artist's late
work, from 1919 to 1923. Gallery director Stephen Romano says he's sold
more than ten pieces; Romano won't reveal the buyers' names but will say
that a major law firm took three and that a stockbrocker, psychiatrist
and film editor have each bought one. In just the last year, the selling
price for a single Dellschau has jumped $3,000, from $12,000 to $15,000.
Next year, the gallery plans to give the artist a one-man show.
-
- But even at the gallery, the aeros' mysteries
stubbornly refuse to yield to either commerce or art history. Two weeks
ago, Romano received a call from a Houston UFO fan named Alexander who
claims he's got Dellschau all figured out. Alexander, of course, refused
to leave his phone number.
-
- _______________________
-
- The Ricco/Maresca Gallery. URL: http://www2.awa.com/artnet/artnetweb/rmgallery/dell/index.html
-
-
- Charles A.A. Dellschau (1830-1923)
-
- AERONAUTICAL NOTEBOOKS JANUARY 8- FEBRUARY
7,1998 OPENING RECEPTION: JANUARY 8th 6 to 8 pm EXTRAORDINARY BODY OF VISIONARY
ART RE-DISCOVERED
-
-
- Forty years after Charles A.A. Dellschau
died, twelve magnificent, illustrated volumes - twenty years of painstaking
work - were tossed out of the Houston,Texas house where Dellschau had worked
in self-imposed secrecy until his death in 1923 at the age of ninty three.
Fortunate circumstances - serendipity of the highest order- led to their
preservation: the renowned Menil Foundation immediately acquired a number
of the books in 1968 but the work remained archived and unseen by the public.
-
- Ricco/Maresca Gallery is pleased to announce
the rediscovery and first one person show as well as the exclusive representation
of the AERONAUTICAL NOTEBOOKS of Charles A.A. Dellschau, accompanied by
a full-color catalogue with a text that explores the visionary journey
of this remarkable self-taught artist. Dellshau's mixed media works incorporate
newspaper clippings of the period, an elaborate symbolic language, and
vividly painted images of fantasy flight that hint strongly of UFO phenomenon.
They take us visually, on an anti-gravity journey that predicts the future
of air flight yet to come. Charles August Albert Dellschau was born June
4,1830 in Brandenberg, Prussia where as a young man he had an intense fascination
with flight and aerodynamics. He first travelled to the U.S. in 1850, and
shortly after moved permanently to Houston,Texas.
-
- Dellschau was a butcher by trade but
spent his retirement cloistered in an attic painting and collating his
images into large scale books. Forgotten for nearly fifty years after his
death, the books were unearthed in the late 1960's, barely escaping destruction.
As a visually compelling body of work created by America's earliest known
visionary, the works have attracted the attention of collectors, curators
and journalists. As early, and as yet unexplained, aviation plans they
have also become a key piece of evidence in numerous attempts to prove
the existence of extra terrestrial life. One hundred years after the period
Dellschau lived, we are once again experiencing a resurgence of interest
in the cosmos. The cyclical nature of this fascination emphasizes the significance
of his books as highly inventive articulation of an age old impulse. Both
the source of Dellschau's inspiration and the meaning of his work remain
elusive.
-
- Working in a self-imposed secrecy beginning
at the age of 76, and continuing for nearly 20 years until his death in
1923, Dellschau produced a remarkable body of work consisting of mixed
media works on paper based on the concept of fantasy flight. The works,
which incorporate an elaborate symbolic language, take us on an anti-gravity
journey which predicts the future of flight, yet to come. This body of
work which was lost and forgotten about from his death until the mid-sixties,
has for the first time been re-discovered. We are pleased to announce the
re-discovery and exclusive representation of this important self-taught
artist.
-
-
- http://www.houston-press.com/1998/121098/feature2-1.html
-
|
