brotherhoods at the core of musical education persisted in private homes,
where Halil learned from ney masters concurrently with undergoing for-
mal painting training at the Academy for Fine Arts. Such private cultural
circles gained importance after the closure of Sufilodges in 1928.
In this context, Halil’s combination of musical and visual artistic prac-
tices suggests an integration of traditional musical concepts within mod-
ernist painting. Invited to the Salon d’Automn in Paris in 1929 for a still life
entitledPotted Geranium, he gave a lecture on Turkish music to a con-
ference of Orientalists at the Musée Guimet.^85 One of his early cubist works
depicts ney players, robed and standing in a row with long caps on bowed
heads, in a cubist style in which repetition suggests the visualization of
musical rhythms. [Plate 17] Sonic geometry transforms into modulated,
dark forms in which afigural foreground merges with the background,
enabling the subterfuge of tradition within the formal vocabulary of uni-
versal modernism.
This short excursion into twentieth-century Turkey suggests the
mechanisms of loss implicit in the teleology of otherwise celebratory
modernity. If the types of knowledge invested in poetry, music, and
geometry appear forgotten to scholars of the late twentieth century, it is
not because they had naturally disappeared across the course of time.
Rather, as in other aspects of modernity, living cultural traditions were
actively suppressed and redirected toward modernist formats of expression
submissive to Western hegemony. It only takes one generation to forget a
way of knowing embodied in practice. Even as art historians increasingly
and fruitfully delve into the history of mid-twentieth-century Middle
Eastern art, we run the risk of perpetuating the celebratory, nationalist
ideologies of the secularist, Westernizing regimes that suppressed the
preceding culture in the formation of the modern nation-state.
Despite this, the agency of forms persists. Polyhedral isometric geometry
diagrams unbounded isometric space on the surfaces offinite objects.
Surpassing the object, pattern encourages the viewer to both see the form
of the object or architecture and to recognize that form is also embedded in
an infinite spatial geometry. Far from simply decorating the object or the
architectural surface, such surface treatment undermines the limits of the
object. By inviting the contemplation of continuity beyond these bound-
aries, such geometry invites contemplation of a reality beyond matter. In
contrast to perspective, which depends on thefixed position of the viewing
subject, such geometry refuses to place the subject. Wherever the viewing
(^85) Ayvazoğlu, 2007 :61–80.
Isometric Geometry in Islamic Perceptual Culture 297