Milein Cosman

Milein Cosman
Cosman drawing Peter Ustinov, Edinburgh Festival, 1947.
Born	Milein Cosman 1921 Gotha, Germany
Nationality	German
Education	Slade School of Art
Known for	Drawing, illustration

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

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 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.