The art of omission: Milein Cosman draws movement

Among Milein Cosman's most treasured possessions was her copy of Ernst Gombrich's book Art and Illusion. It contains a dedication calling her "master of the illusion of movement". Cosman probably could not have imagined greater praise.  One of the most famous art historians acknowledged her success in a notoriously difficult subject: the artistic capture of fleeting movement.

For example, when she wanted to accurately reproduce a person's characteristic gait, Cosman would follow them unnoticed and create a view of their back. Portraits of moving models were  soon to become her specialty.  In the process, she developed a technique over time that enabled her to capture any kind of movement – whether subtle or exuberant, fleeting or sustained, singular or repetitive – in instantaneously comprehensible and memorable drawings.

The catalyst for this development was a fortuitous encounter with a troupe of Indonesian dancers in a small theatre in the Hampstead area of London in 1946.

Since she usually had to work in a darkened room, she concentrated entirely on the dancers and drew without looking at the paper.  Carried along by the rhythm of the music that spurred her on, she was sometimes even at work with her eyes closed, seeming to internalize what she saw as if in a trance.

Cosman familiarised herself with a variety of dance styles and perfected her instinct-led, almost unconscious technique. Her style became more confident and now enabled her to bring out the characteristics of different types of dance.  Shortly after her first encounter with Indonesian dance, Cosman met Tamara, Edo and Liong "Richard" Sie, three siblings of Chinese-Dutch origin who specialised in traditional Balinese dances  and were on a tour through the UK in the summer of 1948. The performances reinforced Cosman's passion for Eastern dance forms.

One study captures Liong Sie's strangely twisted yet fluid movements, another shows the two brothers in a fierce, aggressive duel.

Two other dancers from the subcontinent, Uday Shankar and Ram Gopal, had specialised in a fusion of Indian classical dance with European ballet. With her new, abbreviated style, Cosman was able to reproduce their controlled, restrained gestures, elegant posture and seemingly effortless control of all muscles.

European dances, on the other hand, required a different approach. Spanish dancers, for example, sometimes openly displayed an unrestrained passion for energetic, dynamic movement.

"It would be a mistake to think that a satisfactory action study can be done by posing a dancer in one of his dancing positions – freezing him as it were. Frozen it will look indeed. Having done lots of sketches from the wings of a theatre where a Spanish group was performing, the main partners, a couple of gipsies, kindly offered to pose for me in their dressing room. They held the difficult position marvellously well for about 12 minutes and I was proud to have caught their stance down to the tips of their toes – faces, gestures, everything. At the time I overlooked the sad fact that, for all the detailed similarity (and probably just because of it), I had missed the point. It looked dreadfully stiff and now I wish I could tear the page with this drawing out of all the copies of the Ballet book in which it appeared." [3]

Applied to Antonio el Bailarín and his partner Rosario, who performed at London's Cambridge Theatre in 1951, this method resulted in a series of vivid, emotive drawings that "evoke a mood of languorous and expectant yearning" [4].

Separately, the dancers maintain their ardent passion in poses that embody desire or pride. Here, "the erect torso [...] seems to scorn the agitation of his lower limbs" and the viewer can "listen to the changing song of his feet – and marvel at the possibilities inherent in the human form" [6].

When a troupe of Azuma Kabuki dancers and musicians performed in London in 1955, Cosman added dance and theatre from Japan to her repertoire. Although the mixture of traditions the company performed was so different from genuine Kabuki that only "a diluted taste of the authentic experience" [7] remained, as one dance historian recently noted, Western audiences became enthusiastic about this unusual spectacle, leading to an extension of the company's highly successful London season. 

Another sheet describes a highly dramatic scene: a drunken warrior defends himself against his lover, who has been transformed into a demon and is trying to kill him. His only weapon is a magical sword that can throw lightning bolts. 

A few years after the first Japanese troupes, Chinese classical theatre companies toured Europe. In 1958, Cosman attended a rehearsal at London's Adelphi Theatre. She was particularly fascinated by the male lead in The Monkey Dance. 

Cosman's ability to capture movement and the fleeting moment clearly and unforgettably on paper using only a few strokes and omitting all unnecessary details, reaches a peak in the drawing Chinese Flag Bearer. 

Regularly published in newspapers, magazines and books, Cosman's dance drawings formed the basis of her reputation as an artist. With her characteristic style, which she had found through capturing dance movements, she was to distinctively depict all facets of contemporary life in the decades to come, creating a visual Who's Who of the cultural elite of the second half of the twentieth century.

Footnotes:

[1]   Milein Cosman: "The Depiction of Movement", The Artist, vol. 71, no. 5, July 1966, p. 118-120, here p. 120.

[2]  Milein Cosman: "Memories", in: Ines Schlenker: Milein Cosman. Capturing Time, Munich/London/New York 2019, p. 180-184, here p. 184.

[3]  Milein Cosman: "The Depiction of Movement", The Artist, vol. 71, no. 5, July 1966, p. 118-120, here p. 119.

[4]  Richard Buckle: "Antonio and Rosario at the Cambridge", The Observer, 17 June 1951, reprinted in Richard Buckle: Buckle at the Ballet, London 1980, p. 334.

[5]  Ibid.

[6]  Ibid.

[7]  Samuel L. Leiter: Kabuki at the Crossroads. Years of Crisis, 1952-1965, Leiden 2013, p. 175.

[8]  "graziösen, mitunter auch grotesken rhythmischen Bewegungen": Edgar Stern-Rubarth: "Japans getanzte Märchen", Stuttgarter Zeitung, 15 October 1955.

[9] "primitive Kindermärchen": ibid.