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Lot Essay
In Sonora, California, a mysterious group of aeronautical aficionados including Peter Mennis, George Newell, August Schoetler and Christian Axel von Roemeling founded the Sonora Aero Club. The club rendered plans for airships, held discussions about fuel components, debated engineering techniques and - most intriguingly - may have existed only in the mind of Charles A. A. Dellschau. To date, scholars do not know whether the club, or the discussed members, were real or figments of the artist's imagination.
Dellschau, an immigrant from Berlin who settled in the Houston area, worked as a butcher for most of his life and turned to writing his memoirs and recording the accompanying airships only after his retirement. His connection with the real or imagined California-based Aero Club is chronicled in three memoir manuscripts and later in notebooks that contained mixed-media “plates” (pages) of airships amidst “press blooms” (articles clipped from newspapers). Each page is dated and numbered sequentially, providing a clear chronology to the work. Twelve of these notebooks survive, though gaps in Dellschau's consistent numbering system indicates there were more.
Dellschau, an immigrant from Berlin who settled in the Houston area, worked as a butcher for most of his life and turned to writing his memoirs and recording the accompanying airships only after his retirement. His connection with the real or imagined California-based Aero Club is chronicled in three memoir manuscripts and later in notebooks that contained mixed-media “plates” (pages) of airships amidst “press blooms” (articles clipped from newspapers). Each page is dated and numbered sequentially, providing a clear chronology to the work. Twelve of these notebooks survive, though gaps in Dellschau's consistent numbering system indicates there were more.