Many former students from the Fine Arts departments at UCT and Wits University will remember Evelyn Cohen, a talented lecturer who dedicated her life to teaching art history from the 1960s until the early 1990s. A passionate art educator, she also took a deep interest, as a trained secondary teacher herself, in the broader problems of education at school level in South Africa. Born to Austrian-Jewish refugee parents in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, Cohen was one of the significant postgraduates, along with her colleagues Elizabeth Rankin and Rory Doepel, to emerge from Wits under the tutelage of Professor Heather Martienssen in the 1960s. Martienssen, the first woman to become a full professor at Wits and a doctoral graduate of London’s Courtauld Institute of Art, set rigorous academic standards and her example helped establish the teaching of art history on a firm footing in South Africa.

In 1975, Professor Neville Dubow appointed Cohen to teach art history at UCT's Michaelis School of Fine Art. She was the first full-time appointee in the subject at UCT and drove the establishment of art history as a full 3-year qualifying course for the undergraduate BA degree. By the late 1980s this led to the establishment of an independent art history department at UCT and the introduction of courses at postgraduate level. Cohen was a regular contributor, even in retirement, of pithy and pointed letters to the Press, fearlessly entering the fray in public debate on matters artistic, educational and political. Possessed of a rather theatrical disposition, and a deep love of English literature from an early age, her lectures ignited an enthusiasm for art history in her many students. With them she shared her passion and unique insights on many aspects of the visual arts. Her interests ranged from landscape to fashion and artistic representations of the body; areas which she developed following her studies for an MA in Art History at Sussex University under one of Britain’s most prominent and radical art historians, Marcia Pointon. Among Cohen’s former undergraduate students at UCT can be numbered Tamar Garb, a remarkable feminist art historian who is now Professor of Art History at University College, London (UCL).

In raising standards and adding depth to the teaching of her subject at UCT, Cohen played an important, but often unacknowledged role. Tragically, health problems thwarted her further academic career. Her diagnosis with Motor Neurone Disease, an incurable and fatal degenerative neurological illness, led to her early retirement. In spite of medical opinion that she would only live another three years at most, she survived with determination for well over fifteen, never relinquishing her independence. An unrelated condition she endured was the onset of retinal degeneration, a particularly cruel affliction for someone who had spent a lifetime engaged with the visual arts. The wasting of the muscles in her hands and arms also made writing painfully difficult. A further curse; a form of blood cancer, eventually took her life on 29 July.

Although she seldom published, Cohen’s legacy lies in the dedication that she inspired in her students and in the foundations that she laid for the development of the discipline of art history at UCT. Her book 150 South African Paintings, Past and Present (Struik,1989), co-authored with Lucy Alexander, established a benchmark for what good, collaborative writing on South African art for a popular readership could and should be. Accessible, intelligent, engaging and unpretentious in its scholarship, it generated new insights into the fractious origins and nature of our art and is now deservedly a collector’s item