to the European canon during travels to Venice and Florence in 1936 and Rome, Naples, and Paris in 1937 (he saw Pablo Picasso's Guernica at the Paris World Exposition that year). During World War II Fangor studied art privately under Felicjan Kowarski, who stayed at Fangor family's country estate in Klarysew for several years during the Nazi occupation of Poland, and later Tadeusz Pruszkowski. Fangor obtained his diploma in 1946 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Post-war Poland and Stalinist regime (1947-1956) Following the end of World War II and the Yalta Conference, Poland came under the political influence of the Soviet Union and by 1947—as a result of rigged election—the Stalinist regime under Bolesław Bierut had consolidated political control of the country. During the late 1940s, Fangor supported himself by working on official government projects, including a 1948 large-scale figurative panel in Warsaw depicting silhouettes of workers to celebrate the Unification Congress of the Polish Workers' Party and Polish Socialist Party that took place at Warsaw University of Technology between 15 and 21 December 1948, a consequential political event that is said to have officially turned Poland into a Soviet satellite state. The new cultural doctrine of Socialist Realism, which imposed naturalistic visual vocabularies and mandated that artists focus on themes relating to everyday life under socialism, was officially introduced in 1949. That year, the artist held his first solo exhibition at the Young Artists and Scientists Club in Warsaw. He showcased paintings of landscapes as well as portraits of his family members and of famous Polish figures (including that of Frédéric Chopin) inspired by geometrically fragmented forms of Cubism. The exhibition was not well received by the critics who had to conform to cultural demands of the new Soviet-imported doctrine of Socialist Realism. By the following year, Fangor began painting Socialist Realist compositions. In 1951, he participated in the Second Nationwide Display of Plastic Arts, the second official exhibition of Polish Socialist Realist painting and sculpture organized by the Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions (Centralne Biuro Wystaw Artystycznych) at Zacheta National Gallery of Art, where his compositions titled Matka Koreanka (Korean Mother) from 1951 and Lenin w Poroninie (Lenin in Poronin) from 1951 were awarded the Second Prize for Painting. The former was praised by state-controlled press for its poignant criticism of the Korean War and for challenging what the Soviet Union propaganda defined as colonialist