Mihri Rasim (1885-1954) : l’ambition d’une jeune-turque peintre
Mihri Rasim  (1885-1954) is Turkey’s most important painter and feminist pioneer. The widely shared assumption about her is that she was a marginal, unclassifiable artist, who died in misery and resentful for having dedicated her life to art. Without any real information, authors and art historians obscured their ignorance by elaborating her life story out of her fascinating personality. My dissertation, which is also the first exhaustive art historical study on the artist, is dismantling this myth. Rasim was an ambitious artist and an upstart, Young Turk, who had a strategy to achieve her ambition. From the beginning of her career and for the rest of her life she pursued two goals: she expanded women’s horizon of possibilities and she aspired to be considered, in her own words, “among the talented people”.  In Istanbul at a time when Turkish women could barely leave their harem, she set up the first fine arts school for women. While she was the head of women’s Academy, she introduced the first female nude classes in the history of Turkish arts. She allowed women to receive an art education comparable to European artistic standards and provided them access to a new profession. She created a scholarship for her students at the academy and tried to constitute an association of mutual help for female painters. She also made the portraits of Young-Turk leaders and of their entourage. She used her political connections in Istanbul, and, as she moved from Turkey to Europe to the United-States, she developed her artistic project with new interlocutors and in different contexts but always with the same purposes. She built a network to support her career. In order to achieve this she portrayed great modernist men of the first half of the twentieth century, even controversial ones – Alphonse XIII, Benito Mussolini, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Thomas Edison.  With a feminist approach my dissertation establishes the importance of this cosmopolitan artist of the twentieth century. I am uncovering the details of her life and art, which were disregarded until today. Using original and unpublished archival materials, her elementary biographical facts are clarified. Dates for her works are submitted and identifications of her sitters are made. I propose an innovative approach to examine the painter and her artistic production not only in relation to Turkish plastic arts but also in relation to a more global artistic context. I assess the impact of her actions in her time and ours. My dissertation stands as a testament to the importance of major cultural and political women, and the limits that were and are once again placed upon them.
Mihri Rasim portrait Mihri Rasim female-painter portrait feminism cosmopolitism nationalism Young-Turks reformism