In December 1934, an exhibition of Soviet painting and sculpture opened in Ankara, the capital of the recently proclaimed Turkish Republic, and later traveled to Istanbul, the country’s artistic center. At a time when artists and intellectuals vehemently debated what art in the new Turkey should look like, this exhibition exposed its audiences to various strains of socialist realism, the contemporaneous Soviet proposition of revolutionary art. This paper historicizes the exhibition’s reception in Turkey, asking how it contributed to the ongoing redistribution of artistic values. My analysis understands this exhibition as a discursive site where Turkey’s painters could re-evaluate the Western European artistic criteria that they had previously espoused in comparison with the newly encountered Soviet ones. My discussion focuses on the reviews of Ali Sami Boyar (1880–1967) and Nurullah Berk (1906–1982), two painter-critics from different generations who practiced academic and modernist painting, respectively. By putting close readings of their texts into dialogue with visual analyses of the Soviet paintings that they discussed, this paper will argue that the exhibition did not necessarily disseminate the socialist realist method, which foregrounded the depiction of a model socialist reality to emerge through revolutionary development. Instead, the exhibition functioned as a springboard for reconfiguring distinctive modes of modernist painting that would participate in the new Turkey’s making. Against abstract tendencies, Boyar advocated a figurative modernism that pursued individual expression of the artist through the painting’s formal qualities. At the same time, this modernist painting drew from local and Western European aesthetic traditions to depict contemporary subject matter. Berk’s modernist model, too, remained mostly figurative, though with the explicit task of serving the regime through its socially communicable and politically relevant subject matter. Berk contended that this painting would still stay disinterested and have open-ended meaning. In turn, this modernism would receive state patronage for its production and dissemination, thereby even be able to create its broad public. While both artists-critics remained attached to the Western European artistic criteria of disinterestedness and art as expression, they decidedly rejected its individualist model driven solely by formal, art historical ambitions—abstraction, in particular.