Milein Cosman (1921–2017)

Emilie Cosman, known as Milein Cosman, was born to a Jewish family in Gotha, Germany, and spent most of her childhood in Düsseldorf. Because of the rise of the Nazis to power, she was sent to school in Switzerland. She attended the Ecole d'Humanité and the International School of Geneva between 1937 and 1939. She then followed her brother Cornelius to England. Their parents, who had fled first to Holland, also reached the UK. In London, Cosman studied at the Slade School of Art from 1939 to 1942. The Slade was relocated to Oxford during World War II, and there Cosman studied drawing under Randolph Schwabe and lithography under Harold Jones. Oxford University student and poet Sidney Keyes fell in love with her and dedicated some of his poems to her, but she did not return his feelings. In 1943, she attended evening classes at Oxford Polytechnic. That same year, she began teaching French and art at a convent school, as well as giving lectures on art for the Workers' Educational Association (WEA). After the war, Cosman moved back to London and became a freelance artist/illustrator, while continuing to teach evening classes for the WEA and working for the American Broadcasting Station in Europe. On commission from publishers, magazines, and newspapers, she sketched many great artists of the 20th century, including T.S. Eliot, Igor Stravinsky, Benjamin Britten, Yehudi Menuhin, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Sir Thomas Beecham, Francis Bacon, Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moore. In 1949, she received a commission from the German television news program Heute to draw the post-war cabinet of Konrad Adenauer. These drawings were later acquired by the German Government Art Collection and had their first public exhibition at the Bundestag in Berlin in 2022. In 1947, Cosman met Viennese-born musician and writer Hans Keller, whom she married in 1961. She illustrated some of his books, including The Jerusalem Diary (2001), Stravinsky The Music Maker (2010), and Britten (2013). In her career, Cosman had nearly 30 solo exhibitions in the UK and abroad, and her work was acquired by many leading museums, including the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert, the National Portrait Gallery, the Ashmolean, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin. Milein Cosman: Capturing Time, a biography and comprehensive overview of her work by art historian Ines Schlenker, was published in 2019.