During the 1990's I was in the happy position of being able to attend many classical concerts in London in the company of my great piano teacher, Peter Feuchtwanger. Prof. Feuchtwanger knew all the London concert agents, who regularly gave him blocks of free seats at prestigious recitals at Wigmore Hall and the South Bank.
“Tickets for Shura Cherkassky (or whoever) in my name – as many as you want", he would announce. One would need to arrive early, and there Peter would be, genially holding court before the concert, surrounded by his students (or his children, as he called us) and often by luminaries from the London artistic set too. In his company I met many famous musicians, artists and actors including Steven Berkoff and a delightfully effervescent, bird-like lady who was introduced to me as Milein Cosman. I remember she was amused by my 'musician's name'!
Milein Cosman is best known as an artist who produced hundreds of rapid line drawings of musicians, usually 'in action'.
When I discovered who she was and looked up her drawings, I was immediately taken with the immediacy, energy and authenticity of her line drawings. Usually executed in pen, and superbly urgent and concentrated in style, they often looked as if the implement had never left the page from the beginning to the end of the drawing's creation. They also reminded me of drawings that my mother, an artist in her youth, made of musicians performing in Scarborough while in her teens and early twenties.
Milein (Emilie) Cosman (1921-2017) was born in Gotha, Germany, later moving to Düsseldorf. She studied in Switzerland, arriving in England in 1939 at which time she began to study at the Slade School of Art. Milein Cosman later married the Austrian-born musician and musicologist Hans Keller, whose writing she often illustrated. She also provided illustrations for Radio Times, as my mother told me when I excitedly reported to her one day that I had met Cosman in London!
Cosman produced most of her sketches while observing from the wings at concerts, or sitting in on rehearsals. They are a collective reminder of how inspiring music can be to visual artists and how the expressive gestures and vast range of postures and mannerisms of musicians lend themselves to an artist's scurrying, fleeting pen.
Milein Cosman captured moments in music with mastery and magic This ability to produce 'snapshots' with such breathtaking veracity is something to which I shall return in a subsequent article, linking Rembrandt with film – so watch this 'virtual space'!
MUSIC IN LINE - Copyright Haydn Dickenson 2025
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