The Milein Cosman Archive at the Tate

Milein Cosman’s archive was donated to Tate Archive at the end of 2021, her centenary year, and transferred there during 2022. The Archive is housed in the Library and Archives Department at the Tate Britain building in Millbank, where cataloguing began at the end of 2023. The main work of cataloguing was completed at the end of 2025, and a selection of digitised items was made available online in April 2026: this can be explored here. The full catalogue will be placed online later in the year.

The Cosman Archive contains more than 10,000 items, including all her surviving personal and professional papers, diaries, correspondence and photographs, together with almost all her sketchbooks, and thousands of drawings and prints dating from every period of her working life. This rich archive will enable detailed study of Milein Cosman’s artistic practice, together with the cultural context in which she played such a central role. Having been forced to leave her native Germany by the Nazis, she became part of the vibrant émigré community that did so much to reshape postwar British cultural life. In her early professional life she was widely commissioned to produce drawings for publications and broadcasters including the Radio Times, Financial Times, The Times, LIFE magazine and others. She also created books, designed covers and exhibited extensively. Known best for her drawings of musicians, dancers and other performers, due to her remarkable ability to capture movement, Milein Cosman drew people from all walks of life, and also travelled extensively, recording everything she saw. Carrying her sketchbook everywhere she went, she would draw people, often unseen, from the wings of a rehearsal, during performances, on city streets as well as during commissions. She and her husband Hans Keller had a wide social circle that included many of the most significant cultural figures of the twentieth century, all of whom she drew, and her prolific work provides a unique view of British artistic life at the time.

Tate Archive houses a rich collection of the personal papers, sketchbooks and drawings of artists who worked in Britain in the twentieth century. It is also a centre of excellence for the study of émigré artists and the Cosman Archive will join more than fifty other émigré artist collections, including a large collection from Milein Cosman’s great friend, Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, after whom the Tate Archive Gallery is named.

Researchers wishing to view the collection should contact Tate Archive.