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Recto: Aero Buster Long Cross Cut
Purchased with funds provided by the Annual Gift Appeal.

Aero Buster Long Cross Cut

Recto: Aero Buster Long Cross Cut
Purchased with funds provided by the Annual Gift Appeal.
Recto: Aero Buster Long Cross Cut Purchased with funds provided by the Annual Gift Appeal.
Contact us at copyright@samuseum.org for rights and reproduction of this image. Photography by Peggy Tenison.

Aero Buster Long Cross Cut

Artist: (American, born Prussia, 1830 - 1923)
Date: May 6-8, 1912
Dimensions:
15 1/4 x 19 in. (38.7 x 48.3 cm)
Credit Line: Purchased with funds provided by The Annual Gift Appeal
Object number: 79.20.154
Signed: Recto lower middle: drawn by C. A. A. Dellschau
Inscribed: Recto: Left side: paragraph of text Lower left: Long Cross Cut Lower center: Aero 77 Buster / drawn by C. A. A. Dellschau Lower right: 2557 Verso: Lower left: 2558 Lower center: 12 Lower right: Buster Up Center: CAA D
Label Text
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.
–Thomas McEvilley (American, 1939–2013), critic, poet, novelist, and scholar

Between 1908 and 1921, Charles Dellschau—a German immigrant, retired butcher, and supposed former Sonora Aero Club member—created twelve large, hand-bound books with more than 2,500 drawings related to airships and the development of flight. Stored in the attic of a family home in Houston, Texas, these fascinating works were not discovered until the 1960s, when they were dumped on a sidewalk and salvaged by a junk dealer, after miraculously surviving a fire. While it has never been proven that the Sonora Aero Club existed in Sonora, California, during the Gold Rush (1848–1855), it is clear that this artist possessed a great imagination. Dellschau’s collages document the men and the machines they dreamed up at secretive club meetings dedicated to the discussion of flight exploration, a new frontier during the period when Dellschau created these works. However, his fantasies were not unhinged from reality; they were layered on top of it. Dellschau’s detailed, annotated mixed-media images of heroic flying machines—Barnum & Bailey, Buck Rogers, and Jules Verne all stirred together—are interspersed with collaged pages (which the artist referred to as “press blooms”) featuring thousands of newspaper clippings related to the political events and technological advances of the period.

(Suzanne Weaver, 2019, Group Label)

Not on view
In Collection(s)


The San Antonio Museum of Art is in the process of digitizing its permanent collection. This electronic record was created from historic documentation that does not necessarily reflect SAMA's complete or current knowledge about the object. Review and updating of such records is ongoing.