Kompozycja (c. 1929-1930) and Kompozycja Fakturowa (Textural Composition) from 1931, which rely on interlocking vertical and horizontal shapes to form a geometrical grid. In 1929, Stażewski became a member of the Cercle et Carré and, in 1931, joined Abstraction-Création, two Paris-based groups gathering international abstract painters. Also in 1931, Stażewski, as member of the a.r. group, co-organized the International Collection of Modern Art in Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. Spearheaded by Strzemiński, the collection included works by key modern artists from across Europe, including Fernand Léger, Max Ernst, Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters, and opened to the public on 15 February 1931. By the second half of the 1930s, Stażewski had returned to representational art while still exhibiting abstract paintings and graphic design in Poland and Europe. He also supported himself financially through portrait commissions. During Hitler's invasion of Poland in early September 1939, the building which housed Stażewski's studio in Warsaw was bombed, destroying most of his work. Stażewski remained in Poland and lived under Nazi occupation between 1939 and 1945, first in Szczekociny (1943) and later in Radość (1945), having mostly abandoned artistic production during that period, except for several caricatures and landscapes, virtually none of which have survived till this day. Post-war career Stalinist Poland (1948–1956) In 1945, shortly after the war had ended, Stażewski moved to Warsaw and was hired as the head of the art studio at the Military Geographical Institute. He occupied an apartment on Piękna Street together with artists Jan Rogoyski and Maria Ewa Łunkiewicz-Rogoyska, a space that would become a nexus of Warsaw avant-garde artists and intellectuals in the following years. During the early post-war era, he returned to painting and experimented with various modernist styles, including biomorphic abstraction and semi-figurative compositions inspired by Surrealism (evident, for instance, in the 1947 painting titled Escape). In 1947, as a result of rigged legislative election, the hardline Stalinist Bolesław Bierut became President of Poland. Following the Unification Congress of the Polish Workers' Party and Polish Socialist Party in December 1948, Poland was turned into a satellite state of the Soviet Union. Earlier that year, Stażewski had co-designed decorative glass panels for the large-scale Wystawa Ziemi Odzyskanych (Exhibition of Recovered Territories) held in the city of Wrocław between July and October 1948. A sweeping state-organized display devoted to Ziemie Odzyskane (Recovered Territories), the exhibition celebrated large areas of western and northern Poland that had been annexed