Darker Stars: The Roots of Steampunk Art

Charles Dellschau (1830-1923) Charles August Albert Dellschau was born in Brandenburg, Prussia, and emigrated to the U.S. at age twenty. A father of three, he was a butcher by trade and lived and worked out of an attic apartment in Houston, Texas. After his retirement in 1899, he began to create a series of scrapbooks in which he made drawings of primitive flying machines - which he named press blumen, or “press blooms”. Each machine was named, numbered, given a story and fictional designer, with detailed diagrams from various angles – he also included newspaper clippings related to aeronautics or other pertinent scientific discoveries. He often made notes in both German and English, and incorporated strange symbols throughout the drawings that comprised a secret coded story.

After his death in 1923, the drawings remained undiscovered for over 40 years. The entire body of work was discarded into a landfill, coincidentally salvaged by a used furniture dealer named Fred Washington. He lent them to a local college student who then used the books for a display they were putting on representing the story of flight. The Art Director of Rice University and one of Houston Texas’ leading fine arts collector, Dominique de Menil, was so impressed she bought four of the books. 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.