Milein Cosman

Milein Cosman is a German-born artist based in England. She is best known for her drawings of leading cultural figures, dancers and musicians in action, such as Francis Bacon, T. S. Eliot and Igor Stravinsky.

Biography

Milein Cosman was born in Gotha, Germany, in 1921 but spent most of her childhood in Düsseldorf. Because of her Jewish background and the rise of National Socialism, she went to school in Switzerland, at the Ecole d'Humanité and the International School of Geneva between 1937 and 1939. She came to England in 1939.

Once in the UK, she studied at the Slade School of Art (located in Oxford during the war years); drawing under Randolph Schwabe and lithography under Harold Jones. In 1943 she attended evening classes at the Polytechnic at Oxford, where she was taught by Bernard Meninsky. In the same year she started teaching French and Art at a convent school as well as giving lectures on Art for the Workers' Educational Association (WEA).

In 1946, Cosman moved to London. She began book illustration and working as a freelance artist, while continuing to teach evening classes for the WEA, Red Cross and WMCA and working for the American Broadcasting Station in Europe. She contributed drawings to national and international magazines and newspapers, including the BBC’s Radio Times. Particularly noteworthy is a commission from Heute to draw Konrad Adenauer's post-war cabinet in Germany 1949.

In 1947, Cosman met the Viennese-born musician, writer, broadcaster and teacher Hans Keller (1919-1985), whom she married in 1961. Some books of his writings – 'The Jerusalem Diary' (2001), 'Stravinsky The Music Maker' (2010) and 'Britten' (2013), for example – include many of her drawings and prints.

Milein Cosman made a series of schools programmes on drawing for ITV in 1958. In all, she has had nearly 30 solo exhibitions in the UK and abroad and her work has been acquired by many leading museums including the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Ashmolean Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin. She is renowned for drawing quickly, and much of her work was done from the wings or auditorium during rehearsals for concerts, theatrical and dance performances, capturing movement “in mid-flight” as Ernst Gombrich put it.

In 2006, Cosman founded the Cosman Keller Art and Music Trust, which aims to support young musicians and artists as well as publishing, exhibiting and archiving her own and Hans Keller’s work. Now in her 90s, she has had recent solo exhibitions in London, Glasgow and Gotha. In 2014, a documentary film on Milein Cosman made by Christoph Böll was premiered in Düsseldorf in her presence.

Books produced or illustrated by Milein Cosman

• Hans Keller and Donald Mitchell (eds) (with drawings by Milein Cosman): Benjamin Britten: A Commentary on his Work from a Group of Specialists (London, Rockliff, 1952)
• A Musical Sketchbook (Bruno Cassirer, Oxford, 1957)
• Neville Cardus (with drawings by Milein Cosman): A Composer's Eleven (London, 1958; ISBN 0-8369-1554-2)
• (with Hans Keller): Stravinsky at Rehearsal (1962; published in Germany as Stravinsky Dirigiert)
• (with Hans Keller): 1975 (1984 minus 9) (London, 1977)
• (with Hans Keller): Stravinsky Seen and Heard (Toccata Press, 1982; ISBN 0-907689-02-7). Reissued as Stravinsky The Music Maker (ed. M. Anderson, Toccata Press, 2010)
• (With Hans Keller): The Jerusalem Diary - Music, Society and Politics, 1977 and 1979 (ed. C. Wintle & F. Williams, Plumbago Books, 2001, ISBN 0-9540123-0-5)

Solo shows and exhibitions

1949: Berkeley Gardens, London

1957: Matthiessen Gallery, London

1970: Theatre des Champs-Élysées (Festival International de Danse, British Council), Paris

1988: Stadtmuseum, Düsseldorf

1996: Belgrave Gallery, London

2014: Kunstforum, Gotha

External links

• Works in the National Portrait Gallery
• Milein Cosman's page at Camden Printmakers
• Interview with Milein Cosman on BBC radio