He further argues that the artist serves to funnel the unconscious spirit of
society:
The duty of the artist does not consist of a historical rapture or expression relating
to the past. Art has an entirely living duty. And that is to put the man of society to
sleep, to keep the man of society busy in the realm of dreams, and in this manner to
obtain, a quite useable, rested group of nerves, a fresh communal conscience...He
will awake to life more well and better prepared...For this reason, the artist must
and needs to be a man of his times.^84
Although citing only European sources and advocating cubism, his ideas
echo both the competition of the artists and the slumber-induced social
activism that the Brethren attributed to geometric design–an agent that
would intrinsically induce positive social change, without linguistic inter-
mediary. Cubism served not simply as an indicator of modernity, but of a
modernity infused with local perceptual culture informed by European
engagements with Islam.
İsmail Hakkıhoped to induce social renewal by fostering cubism. In
1933 he became one of the primary supporters of the d Group, a group of
artists exhibiting together who had studied in Paris with André Lhote and
Fernand Léger, both among the Bergsonian cubists of Paris. Although
other artists had already used cubist styles in Turkey and the visual style
of this group was not always cubist, the group identified itself with cubism
as a signal of multivocal democracy resisting the centralized authority of a
single-party system.
The intimate link between the republican suppression of religious cul-
ture and cubism is reflected in the work of Halil (Dikmen, 1906–1964),
who studied withİsmail Hakkıin 1925, and with Lhote in Paris, and began
exhibiting with the d Group in 1939, a year after he became thefirst
director of the Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture, founded in- Trained as a master on the ney, he experienced the privatization of
music education after the Westernization of instruction that occurred as
the Darülelhan was renamed as the Turkish Music Academy in 1926. Like
the growth of Western modes of painting since the nineteenth century,
impositions of Western dress including the hat legislation of 1925, and the
Latinization of script in 1928, which laid waste to the calligraphic tradition,
this closure indicated a radical Westernization of national culture strength-
ened by the outlawing of Turkish music on the radio in 1932. Nonetheless
the long tradition of master–student relationships rooted in Sufi
(^84) İsmail Hakkı, 1931 : 49.
296 Mimetic Geometries