Paul Klee’s return to Bern, by all accounts tantamount to emigration or flight, was the single most violent breach in his life’s story. All of a sudden this internationally recognised artist was faced with increasing intellectual isolation. His contacts dwindled to a small circle of art connoisseurs, collectors and friends. After a barren period of several months Klee began to work again in the spring of 1934. As the example Ruhende Sphinx, 1934, 210 (Reposing Sphinx) shows, he also worked on large formats during this time.

Overall, however, there was no denying the ever stronger signs of artistic crisis during this period from 1934 to 1936, evident among other things in a marked reduction in his creative output.

By the good offices of the art dealer Alfred Flechtheim, who had immigrated to London, the first ever exhibition of works by Klee in the United Kingdom was held at the Major Gallery in London in the spring of 1934. In June Kahnweiler showed the first individual Klee exhibition at Galerie Simon in Paris. In the autumn of that year the catalogue of works Paul Klee, Handzeichnungen 1921–1930 edited by Will Grohmann was published in Germany. After the Nazis seized the work in April 1935 it became clear that any book project on Klee in Germany was now destined to fail.

Before this setback the Kunsthalle in Bern provided an overview of Klee’s work during the years 1919-1934 at a large exhibition held in February and March 1935. Reactions of the Swiss and European press to the exhibition, which was also shown in modified form at the Kunsthalle in Basel in autumn 1935, were moderately favourable. But at both exhibitions sales of his works proved modest. The repercussions of the economic crisis on the art market were clearly being felt in Europe and in the US. Up until the end of 1937 Klee barely sold anything in France, Britain and the US, his most promising market. By contrast in 1936 he was represented with larger groups of works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York at the two most important general exhibitions of the avant-garde of the past few decades, Cubism and Abstract Art and Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism.

In autumn 1935 Klee fell seriously ill. Until spring 1936 his artistic work was paralysed by the illness, which was diagnosed only after his death as incurable progressive sclerodermia. In 1936 Klee travelled to the Swiss mountains for two longer stays at health resorts. And although these spells in the mountains slightly eased the course of the illness, his overall health remained very frail. In 1936 Klee’s artistic output fell to an all-time low, with only 25 works.