and imperialist ambitions of the United States. Painted in a naturalistic manner, Matka Koreanka is a large-scale composition in which a young Korean boy is seen crying over the dead corpse of his mother set against a mountainous background. An image of a burning village in shown in the far distance, as thick clouds of smoke gradually fill the dark sky. In the early 1950s, Fangor had completed multiple Socialist Realist works, including an oil painting titled Postaci (Figures) from 1950 which had not met with critical success at first, but which would later become one of the artist's most recognized figurative compositions. Showing a male and a female laborer in plain clothes juxtaposed with a bourgeois woman dressed in expensive, ostensibly capitalist attire, Figures has been read as "an archetypal expression of the Stalinist exaltation of production over consumption." The artist also began to incorporate Socialist Realist vocabulary into graphic design and several of his agitprop posters, made between 1951 and 1952, were awarded prizes at the Second National Poster Exhibition in 1952. Even though Fangor had been intrigued by the idea of collective artistic action as a means of rebuilding Poland in the aftermath of World War II, he had eventually become disenchanted with Socialist Realism which he saw as an ineffective tool of enacting social or political change. Polish School of Posters (1950s) In 1953, Fangor was employed as an assistant professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, a position he held until 1961. Following Joseph Stalin's death in 1953 and the subsequent Khrushchev's thaw, Fangor began to turn away from Socialist Realism in favor of non-figurative visual idioms. During the early 1950s, Fangor supported himself through graphic design and became one of the co-founders of what would later be known as the Polish School of Posters, together with Jan Lenica, Henryk Tomaszewski and others. The history of Polish School of Posters goes back to 1947 when state-controlled film agency, Film Polski, began to hire artists to create posters for movies distributed in early communist Poland. All films were heavily censored and posters "were not allowed to incorporate any shots of actors, titles, or film stills." However, it was not until the thaw that poster design would flourish, rebelling "against the limits of advertising, the psychology of advertising and propaganda techniques," incorporating avant-garde vocabularies. As scholar Dorota Kopacz-Thomaidis observes, the Polish School of Poster "offered