During the decades of the 1950s and 60s Turkey experienced not only fundamental political transformations, including the transition to a multi-party system and the 1960 military coup, but also a dynamic artistic scene. Along with a general trend toward the rapid expansion of the metropolitan and provincial press, literary and aesthetic journals also proliferated during this period and offered a forum for the publication of modern literature, artwork, and musical scores as well as for the discussion and promotion of political and aesthetic ideologies. In addition, prestigious publications including Varlık as well as more marginal journals such as Yeditepe began to produce annuals that provided yearly overviews of the prevailing aesthetic debates and artistic accomplishments and sought to locate Turkish aesthetics on a local and global level. Scholars, such as Daniel Lerner, associated this growth in print media specifically with Kemalist nation-building and modernization reforms and as evidence that Turkey was developing along a prototypical Western model; however, these aesthetic periodicals and annuals through their representations of aesthetic modernism (in literature, art, and debates) negotiated and often contested Turkish nationalism and modernization and approached aesthetics within the immediate context of Turkey and the greater Cold War era world. The frequent imprisonment of artists and editors, the disruption of publication, and legislative efforts by the political elite to control content manifest the perceived challenge presented by these myriad periodicals to the projects of national and political modernization. This paper examines the convergence of modernization, modernity, and aesthetic modernism in the form of Turkish periodicals and annuals published from 1950 to 1965. As primarily market driven publications with occasional political affiliations, to what extent did aesthetic periodicals provide an alternative to Turkey’s political and economic modernization? How did the editors, authors, and artists determine and represent aesthetic achievements and contemporary debates? How and why was modernist literature and art promoted to target audiences, such as mothers in the case of the journal Aile, as an essential path to modernity for the contemporary Turkish nuclear family? Finally, how did periodicals and annuals as a popular medium for artistic expression and consumption determine aesthetic modernism in twentieth century Turkey?