he studied under Stanisław Lentz. A surviving series of figurative watercolor paintings from 1915—including nudes, portraits, and landscapes—reveals the influence of Impressionist art in Stażewski's early work. Stażewski graduated from the Academy in 1919, a year after Poland had regained its independence. His paintings at the time were inspired by Formizm, a Polish avant-garde group that drew on Cubism, Futurism, and Expressionism and argued against naturalistic representation. In 1921, Stażewski participated in Wystawa Formistów (The Formist Exhibition) at the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts in Warsaw and later that year, he showed his work— together with several early compositions by a fellow Polish painter Mieczysław Szczuka—at the Polish Artists' Club in Warsaw. In 1922, Stażewski was included in the Trzecia Wystawa Grupy Formistów F9 (The Third Formist Exhibition F9) in Warsaw and a year later, in the Exhibition of New Art in Vilnius and the International Exhibition of New Art in Łódź. Polish Constructivism (1924-1930s) The Vilnius exhibition in 1923, which included works by avant-garde artists from across Eastern Europe and Russia, has been credited with introducing constructivist tendencies to Polish art. Among the participating artists who would have a significant impact on Stażewski's approach to artistic production was Władysław Strzemiński, who had previously studied at two Moscow Constructivist collectives, INKhUK and Vkhutemas. In Moscow, Strzemiński had investigated various ways in which art could be harnessed to construct a new, socialist society in the aftermath of World War I, recognizing the role of an artist as that of an engineer as well as a scientist aiding in the process of social transformation. For Stażewski, the connection between art and science was especially crucial and he argued that "a painting's systematic quality connected it to contemporary civilization in a unilateral action—from science and machines to works of art." Through analyzing "the constituent parts of their painting: space, faktura, line, and color," the Constructivist artists were not completely beholden to the notions of intuition or talent, imbuing the process of art making with a sense of objectivity and collective labor. Shortly after the Vilnius exhibition, together with Strzemiński and his wife Katarzyna Kobro among other artists, Stażewski co-founded Blok, or the Blok Group of Cubists Constructivists, and Suprematists (Grupa Kubistow, Konstruktywistow i Suprematystow Blok) (1924–1926), the first Polish Constructivist collective focused on gathering like-minded artists, designers, architects, and theorists to help improve the lives of ordinary citizens. Inspired by leftist