Charles Dellschau - Posthumous Recognition

Posthumous Recognition

The entire body of work was discarded into a landfill in Houston Texas but, luckily was salvaged by used furniture dealer Fred Washington who took them to his warehouse where they ended up under a pile of discarded carpet. Mary Jane Victor, a student at St. Thomas University asked Mr. Washington to lend some of the books to the University for a display they were putting on representing the story of flight. The drawings so impressed Dominique de Menil, the Art Director of Rice University and one of Houston Texas' leading fine arts collectors that she bought four of the books from Mr. Washington. Commercial artist and UFO researcher Pete Navarro acquired the remaining books. The Witte and the San Antonio museum acquired four books each from Navarro. Of the remaining four books, two were ultimately sold to a commercial gallery in New York, one to the ABCD collection in Paris, and one other is in a private collection in Brooklyn NY.

Dellschau's first one-person exhibition "Charles Dellschau - Aeronautical notebooks" and its accompanying catalogue was held in 1998 at the Ricco Maresca Gallery in New York City, some 75 years after his death.

Several notebooks are in the collections of museums in Texas such as the Witte (which mounted an exhibition of Dellschau and Da Vinci called "Flights of the Imagination") and the San Antonio Museum (which curated a solo exhibition of Dellschau entitled "Flight or Fancy? The Secret Life of Charles A. A. Dellschau", also shown at the Menillo Museum in Florida) and the DeMenil Museum. Dellschau's artwork is also in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum, and the ABCD Art Brut collection in Paris, which owns an entire book. Dellschau is also in the collection of the High Museum in Atlanta, the American Folk Art Museum in New York, the Philadelphia Museum, the John Michael Kohler Art Center and several prominent private collections in America and Europe. Several Dellschau drawings were put on display at the Museum of Everything, London England in 2009 as well as in Turin in 2010. The American Visionary Museum in Baltimore has shown the work of Dellschau on several occasions and the INTUIT Museum in Chicago will present a one person exhibition of Dellschau's art in September 2012.

Dellschau is buried in Houston's Washington Cemetery in Stelzig Plot A-70. His last name is misspelled as "Dellschaw" probably as a result of the "u" being written with an elongated tail on his death certificate. His grave marker also abbreviates his name as C.A. Dellschaw (sic).

Charles Dellschau's life and art will be the subject of a monograph to be released in the spring of 2013 produced by Marquand Books and distributed by D.A.P. with essays by Thomas McEvilley, Tracy Baker-White, Roger Cardinal, James Brett, Thomas Crouch, Barbara Safarova and Randall Morris.