Eugen Napoleon Neureuthers Randzeichnungen

As a young man the Munich artist Eugen Napoleon Neureuther (1806-1882) fell out of favour with King Ludwig I when he was commissioned by the publisher Cotta to illustrate the 1830 Parisian July Revolution in a series of large-format arabesques. The renewed wave of revolutionary movements in many European countries around 1830 caused a reactionary turn in Bavaria too. Afterwards Neureuther avoided overtly political expressions in his art, making his name instead with literary marginal illustrations and arabesques, and becoming known in contemporary biographies as a late-romantic conservative arabesque artist. However, a careful reading of his arabesque marginalia show that these do not merely illustrate the literary texts they accompany, but interpret and comment on them, and in some cases even critically undermine them. Neureuther’s lasting sympathies with liberalism can also be clearly perceived. Anna Fricke’s monograph publishes and discusses for the first time all the preliminary sketches for Neureuther’s marginal illustrations for German literary classics, which the artist conceived in direct connection with his revolutionary arabesques, as well as other drawings. In addition, the artist’s manuscript archive, which is in private hands and has only been selectively cited in the literature on Neureuther, is fully listed. Altogether this study corrects the previous one-sided biographical view of the artist.