Remedios Varo, a Spanish-born artist who fled Paris for Mexico during the Nazioccupation, painted "Woman Departing From the Psychoanalyst's Office" in 1960.
Remembering his father's murder during the Nazioccupation, the young Kolakowski accepted communism as an alternative both to Nazi militarism and to the failures of Poland's pre-war system of semi-authoritarian capitalism.
Indeed, beginning with this still life, the joining of the skull with other symbols appears in Braque's mature work only on the eve of World War II, with these combinations continuing during the NaziOccupation.