| | BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 12 x 12 in. / 332 pgs / 250 color. PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 3/31/2013
Out of stock indefinitely DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2012 p. 37 PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781935202905 TRADE
List Price: $55.00 CDN $72.50 GBP £50.00 AVAILABILITY
Not available | EXHIBITION SCHEDULEChicago, IL
Intuit Museum, September 2012 | Dreamer, optimist and visionary — Dellschau is one of America’s earliest outsider artists. |
| | | Charles DellschauText by Thomas McEvilley, Roger Cardinal, James Brett, Thomas D. Crouch, Barbara Safarova, Randall Morris, Tracy Baker-White.
 In the fall of 1899, Charles A.A. Dellschau (1830–1923), a retired butcher from 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. This first monograph on Dellschau includes an essay by art critic Thomas McEvilley, an essay by critic Roger Cardinal of the University of Kent, a text by James Brett of the Museum of Everything in London, an essay by Tom Crouch of the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Air and Space, an essay by Barbara Safarova and a biographical overview by artist and independent curator Tracy Baker-White.
Featured image is reproduced from Charles Dellschau.PRAISE AND REVIEWSBookforum Albert Mobilo 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. |
|  | STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely. | |
| | FROM THE BOOK"Whatever their historical value, 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. '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,' the art critic [Thomas] McEvilley writes." - Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic
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"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
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"The only other substantial book about Dellschau focuses on the historical mysteries surrounding his work and its possible connections to nineteenth-century UFO sightings. 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 | FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/22/2013 "Sometime in the mid-1960s, a junk dealer in Houston, Texas acquired 12 large notebooks that had been thrown out to the curb after a house fire," John Foster writes in this week's Design Observer. "Filled with mysterious, double-sided, collaged watercolor drawings, the journals were eventually discovered at the junk shop in 1969..."
Produced by butcher Charles Dellschau (1830–1923) after his retirement in 1899, the works contained "newspaper clippings (he called them 'press blooms') of early attempts at flight overlapped with his own fantastic drawings of airships of all kind. Powered by a secret formula he cryptically referred to as 'NB Gas' or 'Suppa' — the 'aeros' (as Dellschau called them) were steampunk like contraptions with multiple propellers, wheels, viewing decks and secret compartments. Though highly personal, autobiographical (perhaps!), and idiosyncratic, these artworks could cross-pollinate with the fiction of Jules Verne, Willy Wonka and the Wizard of Oz. The works were completed in a furiously creative period from 1899 to 1923, when air travel was still looked at by most people as almost magical." Featured image is reproduced from Charles Dellschau, the first monograph ever published on the artist.
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