Mihri Rasim and the Founding of the Women’s Fine Arts Academy, İnas Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi: a Double-edged New Social Reality

An iconic and pioneering Ottoman-Turkish portrait painter and educator, Mihri Rasim (d. 1954) resisted social and religious conventions prescribing women’s lives to the intimacy of domestic spheres. A deeply committed feminist, she used her political connections with the Young Turk leaders to help expand institutional, educational, and professional opportunities available to Ottoman women. In 1914, she founded the first fine arts academy for Ottoman women in Istanbul, the İnas Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi. Thanks to her initiatives, women received an art education comparable to European artistic standards considered the best at the time and gained access to a new line of profession. Despite her critical role in Ottoman-Turkish art history and education, scholarship on Rasim is very limited. This article thus aims to bring to the fore her work to establish the Women’s Academy and how it was received. Ottoman women seized the opportunity to enhance their agency in the public sphere and in the male-dominated Ottoman art milieu, although they could not overcome certain cultural and social limitations, real and symbolic, on women’s bodies. The Women’s Fine Arts Academy was a double-edged new social reality. This study argues that the academy also cosmetically served modernization—the principal ideology of the nationalist project.