Milein Cosman (1921-2017): Capturing Time

Nationwide arts festival celebrating refugees from Nazi Europe and their contribution to British cultureMarch 2020 marked the official end of the festival, but also the beginning of a longer-term commitment to celebrating the impact of this remarkable generation of émigrés under the Insiders/Outsiders umbrella

Insiders Outsiders

A talk about artist Milein Cosman, who established herself as one of the most fluent and prolific draughtswomen in this country

To mark the centenary of the artist’s birth, art historian Ines Schlenker, author of <a href="https://prestelpublishing.penguinrandomhouse.de/book/Milein-Cosman-Capturing-Time/Ines-Schlenker/Prestel/e546038.rhd" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Milein Cosman: Capturing Time</a>, will give a talk about German-born artist Milein Cosman (1921-2017), who came to the UK in 1939 and soon established herself as one of the most fluent, vivid and prolific draughtswomen in this country. This will be followed by a shorter talk by Richard Martin, Visual Arts Curator at the Royal College of Music, about the RCM’s recent acquisition and digitisation of over 1300 of <a href="http://museumcollections.rcm.ac.uk/collections/milein-cosman-collection/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Cosman’s drawings o</a>f musicians. Born into a Jewish family, who fled Düsseldorf for Holland in 1938 before moving to the UK, Milein joined the Slade School, which had been evacuated to Oxford, in 1939. In 1946, she began making drawings of musicians for the BBC’s Radio Times magazine and in 1947 went to draw at the first Edinburgh Festival, meeting her future husband, the Austrian musician <a href="https://www.cosmankellertrust.org/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Hans Keller</a>.The main - but by no means the only - arena in which Cosman’s work was shown was the world of music and its publications, including a number of important books by her husband Keller which she illustrated. Late in life, she was recognised by exhibitions in her home town of Düsseldorf (1988), and her birthplace, Gotha (2014). Her work is in many public collections, including the British Museum, the Royal College of Music Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Ashmolean Museum and the Hunterian Museum.<blockquote>“Drawings such as Milein Cosman’s are … more than the sum of a talent for acute observation and an exceptional visual memory. To present a ‘living, speaking image’ of a human being requires above all an intuitive capacity for empathy, an inner resonance.” Ernst Gombrich, 1988</blockquote>This event is held in partnership with the <a href="https://ajr.org.uk/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">AJR</a>.Image: Milein Cosman, Otto Klemperer, (detail), 1970 <a href="https://insidersoutsidersfestival.org/events/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Insiders/Outsiders online events</a> are free, but in order to help us continue our activities into next year and beyond, a donation of at least £5 per event would be hugely appreciated. To donate, <a href="https://insidersoutsidersfestival.org/support-us/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">click here</a>.

Milein Cosman (1921-2017): Capturing Time

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Milein Cosman (1921-2017): Capturing Time

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