ABSTRACT
With its multifaceted treatment of word, image and sound, Eugen Napoleon Neureuther’s art stood at the forefront of the Romantic craze for arabesque illustrations of ballad albums and title pages for scores. Taking Neureuther as its prime example, this essay argues for an area of Romantic experimentation that, skeptical about claims of the absolute and yearnings for the sublime, understood the musicalization of the visual arts as analogy rather than synesthesia, and located the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) in moments of ordinary life. As an ornamental design, the arabesque possessed both scriptural and pictorial qualities—a double nature that facilitated the Romantic inversion of visual motives into textual strategies. Yet sound also plays a powerful role throughout Neureuther’s lithographic work. A distinctive approach to the creation of synchrony is his subtle yet highly innovative contribution to the modernist desire of art’s musicalization. Neureuther’s ability to unify all elements—letter, note, image—in stylistic terms ensures that the shape of each line, whatever its signification or signifying power, corresponds to all others on the page. The result: a holistic integration of script, notation, and mimetic gesture. The unity of the arts becomes the unity of the printmaker’s mark.
