The present work is an exceptional example of oil transfer drawing, an inventive process which Klee developed himself in 1919, whereby tracing paper was transformed into a type of carbon paper. He would cover a sheet of paper with black oil paint and once it was dry to touch, lay it between a fresh sheet and an existing drawing which would then be traced through the surface with an etching tool. The transcribed drawing would somet.mes s be left as is, and somet.mes s enriched with watercolor, as in the present case. Klee’s iconic works The Twittering Machine (1922) and The Tightrope Walker (1923) were executed by this method. The Paul Klee Foundation collects ion holds the drawing for Sharfes Profil, as well as a second oil transfer which is slightly fainter.

In 1924, Klee was still teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar. It was a critical year for the artist in many respects. In January, his famous lecture Liber die moderne Kunst ("On modern art") served to inaugurate the exhibition of his work held at the Jena Kunstverein. His first one-man exhibition in the United States was held by the Société Anonyme in New York, founded by the collects or Katherine S. Dreier. That same spring, Emmy (Galka) Scheyer founded "The Blue Four" group with Feininger, Jawlensky, Kandinsky and Klee, with a view to raising their profile in the United States. In December, the Bauhaus in Weimar was closed after becoming the target of increasingly hostile attacks by right-wing political groups; the school would move to Dessau and Klee would follow.

1924 was a productive year for Klee: in his meticulous oeuvre catalogue, he records 299 works—the highest for any year to date—with a focus on watercolor. Paul Klee's art, though it absorbed modernist tenets and was highly innovative in technical terms, remained peculiarly idiosyncratic and expressive of his wide interests. "Klee created his own dialectic, a universal humanism. Although Paul Klee's prints and transfer drawings represent aspects of the artist's multifaceted work, through them we are provided with keys to his other ideas and are able to glimpse more immediately the source of the energy which flowed through his work." (Howardena Pindell in Paul Klee Centennial: Prints and Transfer Drawings (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1978, n.p.)