One of Haiti's leading artists, Turnier achieved international renown for her fusion of Haitian culture and modernist style.
As a young artist, she admired the work of Candido Portinari and Käthe Kollwitz, though she reported growing out of these early influences.
"[8] N'zengou-Tayo described Turnier, along with Marie-Josée Nadal and Rose-Marie Desruisseaux, the Le Centre's other founding female artists, as belonging to Haiti's middle class.
She and a constellation of artists affiliated with the institution, including Albert Mangones, Gerald Bloncourt, Maurice Borno, Rigaud Benoit, Hector Hyppolite, Daniel Lafontant, and others formed the nexus of the Haitian Art Movement.
[14] In New York City, Turnier studied at the Art Students League where she became steeped in modernist theory that "disdained spatial illusionism, insisting on maintaining the integrity of the picture plane as a flat surface"[3] She married Eugenio Carpi de Resmini, an Italian painter, in 1954.
Despite opposing the prevailing tastes and trends of the time, various museums and archives, the Musée d'Art Haïtien, have preserved many of the works of the Haitian moderns, including Turnier.
[11] Haitian writer Philippe Thoby-Marcelin described how Turnier, along with fellow artists Lucien Price and Luckner Lazare, left Le Centre d'Art because its founder, American watercolorist De Witt Peters, "unduly favor[ed] the popular painters.
"[17] In the 1950s and 1960s, Turnier painted abstract market scenes and other works depicting common people and the complexities of gender, class, and colorism in Haiti.