Mieczysław Szczuka (1989-1927) is one of the top representatives of the Polish avant-garde of the 1920s, for whom functional art was key. He did very fine photomontages. He designed posters and campaign materials for the Polish Communist party.
Along with his life partner and co-worker, Teresa Żarnower, they produced Blok magazine (initially with the assistance of Władysław Strzemiński and Henryk Stażewski), which initiated the era of functional printing (the idea came from Strzemiński – he proclaimed that the concept of a graphic layout should be equivalent to a literary construction, a visualisation of an idea).
Their most acclaimed work, executed in the spirit of their new typography, was the graphic design for Anatol Stern’s poem Europa (1929).