Book & Movie Reviews
CHARLES A.A. DELLSCHAU
Edited by Stephen Romano with an introduction
by James Brett and essays by Thomas McEvilley,
Tracy Baker-White, Roger Cardinal, Tom Crouch,
Barbara Safarova and Randall Morris. Marquand
Books/D.A.P., 334 pages, about 278 color illustra-
tions, 2013. ISBN: 978-1935202905 (hardcover).
This first monograph dedicated to
Charles August Albert Dellschau (1830-
1923), the earliest documented self-
taught artist in the United States, is a
visually fascinating and heavy 12-by-12-
inch, 334-page coffee-table book that
includes more than 250 high-quality
reproductions of a carefully selected
sample of the 2,500 ink drawings and
collages Dellschau painted with water-
color on sheets of butcher paper. The
central motifs of his works are close to
100 different designs of hybrid flying
machines that combine the technology
of 19th century air balloons and early
20th century dirigibles, zeppelins and bi-
planes. Formally, his art is a visual hybrid
that combines the detailed conventions
of mechanical and patent drawings with
the colorful decorative power of illustra-
tion techniques used in architectural
drawings and advertisement designs.
Dellschau first used sepia ink and drafting
tools to draw perfect circles to produce a
series of drawings of flying machines that
include labels, legends and commentaries
much in the style of mechanical or patent
designs. Those early drawings bring to
mind the ink works of Leonardo da Vinci,
with two main differences: Dellschau
embellished the designs with colored
ink washes, more in tone with techni-
cal architectural illustration than with
mechanical drawing style; in some ways,
Leonardo’s flying machines seem less
bold than Dellschau’s fantastic inventions.
Dellschau’s more colorful drawings are
heavily tinted. Sometimes he applied such
a dense layer of watercolor to the central
motifs, the flying machines, that it looks
like gouache. This produces a beautiful
contrast between the machines and the
blue sky areas surrounding them, which
are almost translucent. His technique is
described by Thomas McEvilley, one of the
book’s authors, as similar to “drawing with
paint.” As McEvilley observes, the more
colorful of Dellschau’s works, which also
include ornamental borders, produce a
strange sense of contemplating a Renais-
sance painting with a rustic frontier aura.
Dellschau assembled his drawings in an
unknown number of hand-bound books
of double-sided pages, of which only 12
survive. The careful dating and numbering
of each page and drawing of the existent
books, and the gaps in that numeration
system, suggest that at least 10 other
books were destroyed or, hopefully, have
only not yet been found. Between 1898
and 1921, after retiring from work first as
a butcher and then as a clerk in a saddle
shop in Houston, Texas, Dellschau spent
his last years constructing his books at
a rate of one page every two days. In
1923, after his death at the age of 92, his
books were stored in the attic of his last
residence, the house of a stepdaughter.
Forty years later, they were saved from
destruction by a furniture refinisher and
trader of used artifacts and introduced
into the art world in 1969, in a modest
exhibition on Flight at the University of St.
Thomas in Houston. In 1996, his work was
first included in an exhibition of outsider
art at Baltimore’s American Visionary Art
Museum titled Wind in My Hair. The fol-
lowing year, the Ricco/Maresca Gallery
presented his work at the Outsider Art Fair
in New York.
Dellschau’s work brought back memories
from my childhood, when I spent hours
making designs for a flying machine, not
based on balloons full of gas, as Dellschau
did, but on imitations of the fascinating
movement of birds’ wings. The skills I
developed over the years of making those
technical drawings led to my first job as an
industrial draftsman when I was only 17
years old, long before I became a sociolo-
gist. My past experience with mechani-
cal design and passion for biographical
research makes this book a joy.
This publication was edited by art dealer
Stephen Romano and includes an intro-
duction by James Brett of the Museum
of Everything in London. This excellent
book puts together the results of years
of systematic research on Dellschau’s life
conducted by Tracy Baker-White with
five essays that present the first serious
attempt to analyze various dimensions of
his work: an analysis of the content and
form of his compositions by the late art
critic Thomas McEvilley; an exploration of
the use of handwritten inscriptions and
aerial newsprints by scholar Roger Cardi-
nal; a fascinating contextualization of the
human dream of flight and the history of
balloons by Tom Crouch of the Smithson-
ian National Air and Space Museum; a bril-
liant discussion of his work in the context
of the experience of modernity and exile
by Barbara Safarova, the president of the
ABCD Art Brut collection in Paris; and a
passionate discussion of the enigma that
has surrounded his life and work by writer
and art dealer Randall Morris.
The research done by Baker-White on
Dellschau’s life is well known to The
Outsider ‘s readers from a 2011 essay
published in this magazine. Dellschau
was born in Berlin, Prussia, in 1830 and
migrated to the United States in 1849.
Crossing the Atlantic was a grueling jour-
ney that must have certainly impacted
the 19-year-old man and later inspired
his dreams of transcontinental flights
that would make it possible to cross
the ocean, or the American continent,
in relatively safe and comfortable flying
machines. Evidence found by Baker-White
T H E O U T S I D E R 35
indicates that, after settling with his fam-
ily in Galveston, Texas, for a few years, and
possibly after he was able to save some
money, he traveled to California in 1854,
at the end of the Gold Rush, four years
after that state had become part of the
United States. In 1859, he returned to
south Texas, got married, raised a family
and worked for 30 years as a butcher in
his father’s trade.
Dellschau’s large body of work invites
us to imagine that, late in his life, after
the deaths of two wives and his three
biological children, the five years he
spent in California were transformed
by his nostalgia into a time of youthful
freedom, full of excitement and ad-
venture. His books visually reconstruct
events during those years when he was
living in a boarding house in Sonora,
California, and was a member of the
Sonora Aero Club, a group of drinking
miners who met every week to discuss
their ideas and adventures in designing,
building and attempting to use flying
machines. Every one of the members of
the club had to present a proposal for a
design that was discussed and criticized
by the other members. The club would
then find ways to finance and build the
approved projects.
Dellschau’s visual production includes
a small series of sepia ink drawings
closer to the tradition of illustration and
cartooning that illustrate some events
in the lives of the members of the club.
Those drawings, produced for the pur-
pose of entertainment, show Dellschau’s
great sense of humor as well as his skills
for drawing the human figure in action,
interior spaces, costumes and outdoor
areas that were clearly inspired by the
landscape of the Sierra Nevada foothills.
In his visual memories, Dellschau does
not represent himself as an inven-
tor or flier of those machines but as a
club member in charge of drawing the
designs and recording the events that
took place at those meetings. Maybe
this could explain why he kept all his
books in secret: He might have felt un-
authorized to disseminate the ideas and
designs outside of the Sonora group.
Dellschau’s writing and visual narrative
36 T H E O U T S I D E R
also suggest that he was convinced that
his fellow Sonora Aero Club members
were more advanced in the 1850s than
were the early 20th-century aeronauts
he carefully followed through the press.
This indicates that Dellschau was stimu-
lated to draw not only by his nostalgia or
by the late 1890s series of unexplained
airship sightings called the Great Texas
Airship Mystery but also by the increas-
ing experimentation with flight on both
continents at the turn of the 20th cen-
tury, as Crouch shows in his essay.
In her incisive essay, Safarova asserts
that Dellschau “possesses a certain kind
of lucidity,” perhaps due to his condi-
tion of exile. She notes that his exile or
immigrant condition was not only the
result of his geographic displacement
but was also radically marked by the loss
of his own nuclear family, his separation
from relatives who were still in Prussia
during the first World War and his own
ambivalent feelings during a time of
xenophobia against Germans. As is well-
documented, in the United States during
those years of war, hundreds of books
written in German were removed from
libraries and burned in public spaces.
German immigrants were also forced to
stop speaking their language in pub-
lic. Safarova builds on Bertolt Brecht
and Giorgio Agamben to argue that
Dellschau’s work confirms that exiles
are “dialecticians” who transform their
condition of rejection into a capacity to
perceive and grasp their own time. In his
epic and powerful drawings, Safarova
writes, Dellschau interweaves world
history and “autofiction,” blurring the
boundaries between science and art.
In short, the essays do a good job of
putting Dellschau’s work in biographical
and historical context but present only a
limited exploration of his visual sources.
The symmetry and sense of balance that
characterize his compositions are inter-
preted by McEvilley as evidence that his
drawings are “very involved in the tradi-
tion of the mandala” art. If his drawings
recall the mandala form, this is an inter-
esting visual coincidence that, however,
does not say much about Dellschau’s
sources or the visual culture to which he
was exposed. Cardinal seems on target
in his assertion that Dellschau’s use of
printed images and segments of news-
prints are like “tokens of modernity” that
provide his work with a “potent aura of
immediacy and plausibility.” But the con-
ventions of technical drawing and indus-
trial patents as models of representation,
as well as Dellschau’s use of collage, still
require an in-depth exploration.
The partial analysis of Dellschau’s visual
sources is accompanied by a celebra-
tion of the mystery that surrounds his
life and work, a recurrent tendency in
the literature on outsider art. The lack of
records to this date about the existence
of any of the other Sonora Aero Club
members has been taken as an indica-
tion that the entire story constructed
by Dellschau may be only a figment of
his imagination. As is well-discussed in
the book, especially in Morris’ inspiring
essay, this possibility obviously does not
diminish the visual power of his work. It
is understandable that the aura of mys-
tery in Dellschau’s work, as is the case
with many other self-taught artists, due
to the elusive nature of creation itself,
will always be, for some, an aesthetic
and spiritual experience.
But celebrating mystery, despite a lack of
knowledge about the specific life experi-
ences and sources that shaped his work,
does nothing to advance our under-
standing of Dellschau’s art. In short, we
have to be careful that the celebration of
mystery does not become a celebration
of ignorance. Despite these quibbles,
however, this handsome and well-edited
volume, shaped by some of the most
important voices in the field, provides
another self-taught artist’s fascinating
life story and surveys an amazing body
of artwork.
—VICTOR M. ESPINOSA
A PUBLICATION OF INTUIT: THE CENTER FOR INTUITIVE AND OUTSIDER ART VOLUME 18 | FALL 13

The A life in art

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