William Cohn was born in 1880 in Berlin into a Jewish family. Having completed his undergraduate studies in art history and archeology in Paris and Berlin, he enrolled at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg. He immigrated to England in 1938 to escape Nazi persecution and settled in Oxford, where he worked as a museum advisor, including to the Ashmolean Museum, helping to establish what is now known as its Eastern Art Department.
Art historian William Cohn was born in 1880 in Berlin into a Jewish family. Having completed his undergraduate studies in art history and archaeology in Paris and Berlin, he enrolled at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, receiving his doctorate in 1904. From 1907 onwards he regularly lectured and published articles on the history of Japanese and Chinese art, including for Der Cicerone, Wiener Neue Freie Presse, Münchener Allgemeine Zeitung, Berliner Tageblatt, Die Schaubühne, Kunstchronik and Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft. In 1908, his first book entitled Stilanalysen als Einführung in die japanische Malerei [Stylistic Analysis as an Introduction to Japanese Painting], was published in Berlin, after which, together with his wife, he travelled to Japan (1909), China (1910) and the USA (1912). Shortly after his return, he co-founded, together with art historian Otto Kümmel, the Ostasiatische Zeitschrift, a periodical specialising in East Asian art. In 1913–14 Cohn travelled to India and Ceylon. After the First World War (during which he, although drafted, was not deployed), Cohn worked as an advisor for several Berlin museums, among others, helping to catalogue the collection of the Museum of East Asian Art (now part of the Berlin State Museums). From 1921 he was a lecturer at the Lessing University in Berlin and a corresponding member of the Vereeniging van Vrienden der Aziatische Kunst [Association of Friends of Asian Art] in Amsterdam. Between 1921 and 1925 he published the eleven-volume Die Kunst des Ostens in Einzeldarstellungen [The Art of the East in Detailed Catalogue Entries], followed by the Jahrbuch der asiatischen Kunst [The Yearbook of Asian Art] (1924–25). In 1924–25 he undertook several additional research trips, including to Ceylon, India, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Java, China, Japan and the USA, publishing his travel diaries in 1925–27. In 1929 Cohn became the curator of Berlin's Ethnological Museum. Art historian Curt Glaser, publisher Bruno Cassirer and art collector Eduard Freiherr von der Heydt were among his close friends and colleagues during this period. Following the rise of the National Socialists to power in Germany in 1933 and the introduction of anti-Jewish legislation, Cohn was no longer able to work as a lecturer or a curator. In Autumn 1936 his name was included as an art historian in the List of Displaced German Scholars published in London by the Notgemeinschaft Deutscher Wissenschaftler im Ausland [The Emergency Association of German Scholars in Exil], the object of which was to 'find openings for those German scholars who have lost their positions in Germany as a result of political developments since 1933' (Displaced German Scholars: A Guide to Academics in Peril in Nazi Germany During the 1930s (Borgo Press, 1993)). He also lost his long-standing Germany-Japan Society membership and his name was removed from the imprint page of Ostasiatische Zeitschrift. At the instigation of Otto Kümmel, Cohn had become secretary of the Society for East Asian Art, but in 1938 he had to relinquish this position as well.
In December 1938 Cohn immigrated to England with his wife, settling in Oxford. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, he was briefly interned as a so-called 'enemy alien' in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk and at Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man (the so-called 'artists' camp, due to the significant number of internees with established artistic reputations), from where he was released in September 1940. Returning to Oxford, Cohn integrated himself successfully into local academic life. In 1942 he sat for the painter and fellow émigré Katerina Wilczynski (1894–1978, whose work is held in the Ben Uri Collection) as part of her series of drawings entitled Oxford Figures (Cohn's portrait is currently in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).
In 1943 Cohn became Chairman of the Oxford University Anthropological Society, and in 1945–46 he assisted with the reorganisation of the British Museum collections in London prior to the institution's postwar reopening. Cohn and his wife were naturalised British on 28 January 1947. Returning to Oxford, Cohn enrolled at New College and was awarded a masters degree, afterwards giving lectures on East Asian Art at the University of Oxford and working as an advisor to the Ashmolean Museum. In 1947 he founded the magazine Oriental Art, published until 1951 (the magazine resumed its publication in 1953 under the editorship of Peter C. Swann). In 1949 Cohn helped create the Museum of Eastern Art (now operating as the Eastern Art Department of the Ashmolean Museum). Cohn retired in 1955. The same year, a bibliography of his written work was published in Oxford by Dr George Hill (born Günther Hell), son-in-law to émigré publisher, Bruno Cassirer, coinciding with Cohn's seventy-fifth anniversary. In 1960 the University of Oxford awarded him an honorary doctorate in literature. Cohn died in 1961 in Oxford. In 1963 Cohn's widow, Isabella Cohn founded the William Cohn Memorial Lecture, financed from the compensation payments made by Germany to victims of the Third Reich.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [William Cohn]
Publications related to [William Cohn] in the Ben Uri Library