Art, Access and Influence: Mihri Rasim’s (1885–1954) Transnational Strategies Through Portraiture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article investigates the strategies employed by women artists during the first half of the twentieth century to secure patronage and achieve recognition within male-dominated artistic and social spheres. It centers on the career of Mihri Rasim (1885–1954), an Ottoman-born portraitist whose transnational movements offer a compelling case study for understanding the dynamic interplay of art, access, and influence. Drawing on archival sources, it demonstrates how Rasim mobilized art as a social and political instrument to cultivate a network that sustained her professional activity across diverse cultural contexts. It also explores how she used these networks to create or support opportunities for other women artists. Rasim relied on her upper-class background, initiated contact with prominent political and cultural figures, and often produced portraits without commission as a way to introduce herself and her artistic persona to prospective patrons ranging from Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Benito Mussolini to Thomas Alva Edison. By examining Rasim’s tactical engagement with elite circles, this study shows how professional survival and visibility for women artists during this period often depended on their ability to navigate and capitalize on social hierarchies and geopolitical structures. It argues that artistic agency relied as much on the art of asking as on talent or institutional support.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".