A Portrait in Motion

The remarkable life of Mihri Rasim (1885–1954) – a prolific Ottoman-Turkish portraitist who overcame rigid artistic hierarchies, cultural expectations, and political upheaval across three continents – has left surprisingly few discernible traces. Yet portraiture, power, and survival define both her extraordinary journey and the body of work she created, which continues to command attention. She portrayed an extraordinary range of figures including Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Thomas Edison, Benito Mussolini, and Sarah Bernhardt.

Özlem Gülin Dağoğlu paints the picture of an artist negotiating transnational migration and professional precarity. Audacious and enterprising, Rasim emerged just as modernity crystallized and the Ottoman Empire transformed into the Turkish Republic. In Istanbul she cemented her political allegiances through a series of portraits of Young Turk leaders, founded a fine arts academy for Ottoman women, and maneuvered within the male-dominated Late Ottoman cultural world of which she was a part. After sojourns in France and Italy, she departed for the United States in 1927. Throughout her career Rasim was acutely aware of the power of appearance: how she could shape the way others saw her subjects on the canvas, and how others’ perceptions of her expanded or restricted her opportunities and successes.

Artistic talent, ambition, diplomacy, and social networks intersected in complex ways in the first half of the twentieth century. Compelling and powerful, A Portrait in Motion tells the story of an intrepid professional woman artist, reshapes our understanding of global modernism, and reassesses the lasting significance of figurative portraiture.