would give the artist the social mandate to reveal a collective identity to his
society. Although some of his admirers in the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries compared Bergson’s thought to that of his friend the French Sufi
Réne Guénon (1886–1951) and contemporary trends in theosophy
(a pseudo-philosophical amalgam of Eastern teachings rooted in recent
translations by Orientalists), he framed his work as purely Western, citing
Neoplatonic inspiration.^80 Similarly, Piet Mondrian came to paint works
resembling a sixteenth-century Persian calligraphic panel by abstracting
the intrinsic geometries of a tree, drawing both on his knowledge of the
cubist movement during his student years in Paris and on his involvement
in the theosophical movement.^81
The thought of Bergson and ibn al-Haytham, and the formal properties
of a sixteenth-century calligraphic panel and a twentieth-century cubist
painting resemble each other not by accident, but because they share
sources of thought, itself rooted in observations of nature. Is this
Western or Platonic, theosophical or Islamic? The question itself veers
between the cultural appropriation in assuming Platonism to be purely
Western and the competitiveness of doing somethingfirst. Rather than
looking to the contentious competition of Zeuxis und Parhassius, we might
remember the cooperation modeled by the Greek and Chinese artists, who
build on one another’s work in order to recognize a space transcending the
materiality of identity and enabling the recognition of truth.
Such shared interest in structural rather than superficial realism proved
inspiring for modern Turkish intellectuals trying to incorporate Islamic
traditions into enforced modernity. In his 1931Democracy and Art,İsmail
Hakkı(Baltacıoğlu) proposes art as necessary for democracy.^82 He says:
The artist speaks the immanent/mystic conditions that exist within a people, but
which are either asleep or are not conscious enough to express themselves and
thereby gives his people a language, that is a consciousness. In this manner souls
which have unwittingly been separated and segregated come together. For this
reason, the role of the artist is in one sense a moral role, because it serves for social
unity. This underlies the comparison of the artist to a concave mirror. As a
function of its technical nature, this living mirror collects the scattered lights
around it into its own focal point and reflects them more warmly and with greater
shine. The peoplefind themselves in the artist. For this reason, the greatest sign of
the soul of the artist is love.^83
(^80) Gouhier, 1993. (^81) Fingesten, 1961.
(^82) He acquired his surname in 1934, with the adoption of a law requiring surnames.
(^83) İsmail Hakkı, 1931 : 27.
Isometric Geometry in Islamic Perceptual Culture 295