If “modernism” labels the aesthetic mode of relating to modernity and modernization, this chapter posits that a modifier is needed for thinking about and understanding Turkish modernism: syncretic. For painters in the late Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic, learning to speak the language of easel painting – the ultimate lingua franca they aspired to communicate through – was a laborious and gradual process, let alone participating in or contributing to what might be considered its modernist manifestations. Understanding and appreciating the modernism their artworks came to embody requires the historian as well as the onlooker to embrace the mispronunciations, the direct translations, the awkward appropriations, and the envious emulations, as much as highlighting the more fluent and effortless instances of speaking the language of oil painting that these artists eagerly adopted. Rather than evaluating the aesthetic worth of these artistic endeavors through the lens of formal affinity to their Western counterparts, it is crucial to see these paintings as a series of negotiations and articulations that evince larger societal and cultural transformations.