Mihri Müşfik Hanım

Mihri Müşfik Hanım in the 1910s

Mihri Müşfik Hanım , also Mihri Açba or Mihri Rasim (born February 26, 1886 in Istanbul , † 1954 in New York City ), was a Turkish artist . She is considered one of the most important painters of the late Ottoman period. She was best known for her portraits of famous people like Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and Pope Benedict XV. as well as their portraits of women.

Life

Mihri Müşfik Hanım was born in 1886 as the daughter of a noble Abkhazian in the Kadıköy district of Istanbul . Her father was Çerkez Ahmed Rasim Pasha, an anatomist and important teacher at the Military Medical Academy. He was considered very interested in art and encouraged the daughter from an early age. Mihri Hanım's Abkhazian mother was Princess Fatma Neşedil Hanım, one of Rasim Pasha's wives. Her younger sister Enise Hanım was the mother of the painter Hale Asaf . Like many daughters of upper class Ottoman society, Mihri Hanım also received a Western-oriented education and was interested in literature, music and art. She received her first painting lessons from the Italian painter Fausto Zonaro in his studio in the Beşiktaş district .

When Mihri Hanım fell in love with the Italian director of an acrobatic group, whom she had met at Zonaro, she went to Rome with him. But the relationship did not last long: after a year she moved to Paris to immerse herself in the local art scene and become an artist. She lived in a small apartment in Montparnasse and made money doing portraits. She also rented one of her rooms to students. One of these tenants was the political student Müşfik Selami Bey, whom she later married.

At a reception in Paris, Mihri Hanım was introduced to the Ottoman Finance Minister Cavid Bey , who was in the French capital to negotiate an agreement with the government after the Balkan Wars . The politician seems to have been enthusiastic about the young artist, because he suggested her in a telegram to the Ottoman Minister of Education as an art teacher for the school for teacher training in Istanbul. She was accepted and therefore returned to Istanbul in 1913. When İnas Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi, an art school for women, was opened on her initiative the following year, she switched to teaching there and later became its director. Your work is considered revolutionary. Not only could women now be trained to become artists, Mihri Hanım's lessons were particularly vivid. Not only did she get women to sit as models, but she also borrowed sculptures from the city's antiquity museum for the students to draw. But that also got her into trouble: when she wanted to bring a naked male sculpture to class, the museum management protested. Mihri Hanım avoided a scandal by wrapping a towel around the statue's waist. Again and again she encouraged her students to look over the shoulders of the famous painters in the studios and to paint in the open air.

Mihri Hanım came into contact with the Ottoman-Turkish literary circle Edebiyat-ı Cedîde and became friends with Tevfik Fikret . Fikret's house in the Aşiyan district became a studio for the young artist. The literati of the Edebiyat-ı-Cedîde movement were influenced by French literary currents such as Realism , Parnassia and Symbolism . This also strongly influenced Mihri Hanım's work. Her work is heavily inspired by French painting. For Fikret she made illustrations for his poems, repeatedly she painted the protagonists of the Turkish literary movement and thus became her chronicler.

In 1919 Mihri Hanım fled Istanbul. Their proximity to the Young Turkish Committee for Unity and Progress has been criticized and the occupation of Istanbul by the Allies changed the climate in the city. She traveled to Italy but came back within a year and became a teacher at her old school again.

At the end of 1922, her marriage to Müşfik Bey broke up. Mihri Hanım traveled to Italy again and the couple divorced in 1923. She had an affair with the Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio . Through him she was given the opportunity to portray the Pope and was able to earn some money restoring frescoes in a chapel. Shortly after the founding of the republic, she returned to Turkey. Her closeness to the Young Turks paid off: She was allowed to paint Ataturk and personally present the portrait to him in Çankaya Köşkü in Ankara .

In the following years, Mihri Hanım traveled to Rome and Paris and later to the United States ( New York City , Boston , Washington, DC and Chicago ). When and why she left Turkey and traveled to the USA is not known. On November 25, 1928, however , the New York Times reported in a short report that a collection of works by the Turkish woman would be on view in the George Maziroff Gallery.

In 1938 and 1939 Mihri Hanım worked as a hostess at the World Exhibition in New York . During this time she also painted a portrait of Rezzan Yelman, the wife of journalist Ahmet Emin Yalman , who lived in New York. During the Second World War, she made a living from the illustrations she drew for New York magazines. After the end of the war, their trail is lost. In 1954 she was buried almost penniless in a poor grave on Hart Island .

meaning

In addition to her outstanding role as a teacher for a young generation of Turkish women artists, Mihri Hanım also shaped the image of the Ottoman women of her time. She no longer portrayed women as oriental beauties or odalisques , but as emancipated women of high society. At the same time, her works reflect the social circumstances of the time, which was strongly influenced by Ataturk's orientation towards the West.

literature

• Mahinur Tuna: İlk Türk Kadın Ressam Mihri Rasim (Müşfik) Açba . Istanbul 2007
• Wendy MK Shaw: Ottoman Painting. Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic . Tauris, London / New York 2011, pp. XIII, 116f, 138f, 153, 161
• Burcu Pelvanoğlu: Painting the late ottoman woman: Portrait of Mihri Müşfik Hanım . In: Duygu Köksal, Anastasia Falierou (Ed.): A Social History of Late Ottoman Women: New Perspectives . Brill, Leiden / Boston 2013, pp. 155–170
• Nilgün Sarp: Bir Osmanlı Prensesi Ressam Mihri Müşfik . İstanbul Kadın Ressamlar Derneği, Istanbul 2013

Web links

• Biography , sanalmuze.org
• Selection of works , turkishpaintings.com

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Murat Bardakçı: Mihri Rasim'in saklı hayatı , Habertürk , March 2, 2015 (Turkish)
2. ↑ Mihri Müşfik Hanım in the Istanbul Women's Museum
3. ↑ Pelvanoğlu (2013), p. 161
4. ↑ Pelvanoğlu (2013), pp. 162, 168f