Paul Klee took up his position at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts teaching painting technique in October 1931, with initially a mere four students. Although he rented a room in Düsseldorf he kept his apartment in Dessau until March 1933. He had his own studio in both of these towns, and worked on different styles in either. In Düsseldorf he worked intensively on paintings that involved a pointillist technique.

Already the threatening economic and political changes that would eventually lead Germany towards Nazi dictatorship had been noticeable. In 1929 the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange triggered a world economic crisis whose repercussions, combined with the worsening political crisis, were lastingly felt also by Klee in the early 1930s. The economic crisis and mass unemployment peaked in Germany in 1932. On 30 January 1933 Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of the German Reich. With Hitler now in power the Nazis stepped up their defamatory campaigns against modern art. The new ruling power began to undermine trade in modern art and forced many artists and art dealers to emigrate.

In March the Nazis ordered a search of Klee’s apartment in Dessau. Klee fled to Switzerland immediately thereafter. On 21 April, even before his move from Dessau to Düsseldorf, he was suspended from his teaching position “with immediate effect”. In the autumn he was notified of his dismissal with effect from the end of the year. Given the worsening economic and political situation Klee tried to establish new contacts with the art trade. He concluded a general agency agreement with Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the owner of Galerie Simon. The agreement with Kahnweiler came about at the recommendation of the Bern collector Hermann Rupf, who had been one of the very first collectors to acquire works by Paul Klee as early as the 1910s.

Even after his return to Germany Klee initially underestimated the danger that threatened him from the new regime. It was only on 23 December 1933, at his wife’s insistence, that he immigrated to Switzerland. The political upheavals and the threat to his own existence were incorporated into and translated in an increased output: 1933 was his most prolific year to date. In his catalogue of works he recorded a total of 482 works, of which 314 were drawings. In various works from this period he took up position on Nazi politics.

Equally Klee was among those exponents of "entartete Kunst" (degenerate art) most frequently disparaged in the German press. In 1933 his paintings are exposed to public ridicule by the Nazis at three so-called "Schandausstellungen" (exhibitions of shame) held in Mannheim, Chemnitz and Dresden.