During World War I he discovered Futurism and Dada, and in 1918 he met the futurist Aleksander Wat and the formist Anatol Stern, fellow Jews whose Polish language verse he later illustrated.

[citation needed] In 1920 Berlewi attended El Lissitzky's lecture in Warsaw, motivating him to move to Berlin, where in 1922–1923 he abandoned figurative art for pure constructivist abstraction.

[citation needed] In March 1924 Berlewi published his theoretical tract (in progress since 1922) Mechano-Faktura, using mechanical means to create texture, prefaced by the writer Aleksander Wat.

Its basic premise rejects the illusion of space in favor of two-dimensionality; color is reduced to black, white, and red, and visual equivalents of images are accomplished by mechanical means using rhythmic arrangements of lines and simple geometrical forms such as circles and squares.

[3] In summer 1924 Berlewi was invited by Herwarth Walden, founder of the Der Sturm magazine and gallery to exhibit his mechanofaktura works in Berlin; the German version of his manifesto was published.