The Nazis described Paul Klee’s work as "insane childish scrawling." In 1933, the 54-year-old former professor at the Bauhaus, an influential art school founded in Weimar in 1919, was highly established and represented in most German museums and internationally. Yet the Nazi authorities dismissed Klee from his teaching position in Düsseldorf in 1933, and he returned to Switzerland. Eventually more than 130 works by Klee were removed from German museums, including Around the Fish from the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden. When MoMA purchased the painting alongside works by André Derain, Henri Matisse, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in 1939, MoMA director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., announced, "The only good thing about the exile of such fine works of art from one country is the consequent enrichment of other lands where cultural freedom still exists."