The introduction provides a comprehensive historiographic overview of art historical works that established the dominant canon of Iranian modernist art. This demonstrates how the common narrative in Iranian art historiography has been predominately modeled after Western modes of knowledge production based on linear narratives of stylistic development. Such a formalist canon, however, largely detaches Iranian modernist production from its sociopolitical context of origin, reduces the artworks to mere aesthetic experiments with Western modernity, and situates it in a historical vacuum. This raises the questions: what does it mean to write Iran’s modernist art history? What interests are behind the idea of formalist progress and the depoliticization of modernist art from Iran? This outline determines the book’s main arguments, namely that Iranian modernist art and criticism functioned as a discursive field to critically explore notions of modernity and modernization. Second, the depoliticization of Iranian modernist art follows a political agenda. Methodologically, the introduction establishes the theoretical framework rooted in global art history and postcolonial theory to deconstruct imperial concepts of modernity and thus decolonize Iranian art history.

The conclusion imagines an art history out of perspective, modeled instead on laterally infinite isometric geometries experienced not only in Islam, but also corresponding with other theorizations of egalitarian subjectivities. Interested, transmedial, decentered, egalitarian and atemporal, such subjectivity forgoes the position of mastery. Using historic texts to articulate an episteme describing Islamic perceptual culture, this work dissolves the possibility of segregating secular and sacred realms. Art-historical premises such as the centrality of vision, the role of the image, the importance of the object, the linearity of history, the centrality of matter, and the authority of perspective become contingent. Focusing on reception over production, the study of perceptual culture undermines the value of distinguishing between media as a means of approaching culture. Featuring experience over materiality, it includes non-material entities such as music and dreams. Rejecting the hierarchy of the eye, it valorizes the ear and the heart. It recognizes the possibility of physical preservation only through the concomitant preservation of ideas. It invites us to invent an art history that inhabits the unfamiliar rather than reconfiguring the Other into familiar forms. Rather than learning about cultures, it proposes that wisdom depends on our learning from them.