1925 was a year of important decisions and successes abroad for Paul Klee:

In March the Dessau Local Council decided to take over the Bauhaus in Weimar, which had recently been closed. After some hesitation Klee decided to keep his teaching post at the Bauhaus although he only moved there in 1926; he and his family lived with Wassily and Nina Kandinsky in one of the three two-family dwellings designed by Gropius for Bauhaus masters. Klee and Kandinsky now also held a free painting class in Dessau.

In July the Brunswick businessman and collector Otto Ralfs founded the Klee Society, which secured the artist a monthly additional income from purchases of art work right up until the late 1930s.

In the autumn Klee terminated the general agency agreement with Hans Goltz by mutual consent. He thus took charge of the management of his own exhibition and sales activities, as he had done during his Munich period before 1919, and co-operated simultaneously with several art dealers. He subsequently intensified his business contacts with Alfred Flechtheim, who owned two galleries by the same name in Berlin and Düsseldorf. Up until 1933 Flechtheim was to be his leading international art dealer.

The Pädagogische Skizzenbuch (Pedagogical Sketchbook), an abridged version of his first semester lectures, was also published in autumn 1925 as the second volume in the series of Bauhaus books. In October the Galerie Vavin-Raspail in Paris opened Klee’s first individual exhibition in France; and in November the Surrealists exhibited two of his works as part of their first group exhibition at the Galerie Pierre in Paris. At that time the Surrealists, foremost among them René Crevel, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon and Max Ernst, had been among the biggest admirers of Klee’s art for many years.

At the same time as his teaching work at the Bauhaus Klee also worked on his paintings. During the term holidays he travelled extensively to Italy (1926, 1930), Porquerolles and Corsica (1927), Brittany (1928) and the Basque Country (1929). Thanks to financial support from the Klee Society he was able to journey to Egypt in December 1928 and January 1929.

Klee’s essay entitled "exacte versuche im bereich der kunst" (precise trials in the field of art) was published in the bauhaus magazine in 1928. Under its new Director Hannes Meyer the Bauhaus definitively espoused the constructive-functional line. Although this trend was also reflected in Klee’s work, he was increasingly dissatisfied with his work at the Bauhaus. In the light of the political unrest in and around the Bauhaus, from 1928 he began to consider leaving the art university. His teaching position in Dessau had become more and more of a teaching obligation from which he could not free himself out of economic considerations.

In 1929 he contacted the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. At the same time the number of important exhibitions and publications on Klee was increasing both in Germany and abroad: To mark his 50th birthday Galerie Alfred Flechtheim in Berlin and Galerie Neue Kunst Fides in Dresden each organised a general exhibition on Paul Klee at the end of 1929 and the beginning of 1930 respectively. In Paris Christian Zervos published a monograph with an introductory text by Will Grohmann at his Cahiers d'art publishing company; in 1930 René Crevel published another Klee monograph in French. The same year exhibitions were held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at Galerie Flechtheim in Berlin and in Düsseldorf, at the National Gallery in Berlin (Otto Ralfs collection); in 1931, at the Kestner Society in Hanover, at the Düsseldorf Kunstverein, and at Galerie Flechtheim in Berlin. During these years Klee was at the peak of his success, and regarded internationally as one of the most highly respected artists in Germany.

Klee terminated his contract with the Bauhaus with effect from 1 April 1931, and took up an appointment at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. His move to Düsseldorf was the subject of controversy in the press.