On 8 April 1938, Gustav Wolf emigrated from Germany, arriving by ship at his destination: New York. Artistically productive though by no means financially successful, in the following years the painter and graphic artist engaged with the subject of his new home. It was a creative confrontation that proved exhaustive for Wolf.

The artist, who was originally from Östringen near Karlsruhe, found the atmosphere of New York disturbing and threatening, an impression that was compounded by his financial worries and fears. The future American metropolis seemed like a new Babylon. Wolf nevertheless engaged a great deal artistically with the appearance of New York, its streets, steep skyscrapers and narrow urban canyons. He drew up specific lists of the best places for him to draw. In his 1942 work Vision of Manhattan, he devoted an entire graphic series of twelve prints to the southern tip of the city. In this work he grappled with the lost position of the individual in the face of a large metropolis. A small sketch of buildings also makes reference to Wolf's place of exile, whose appearance dwarfs the human scale.

On a little scrap of paper, Wolf arranged skyscrapers close to one another in a dense conglomeration. They protrude upwards sharply and steeply like obelisks. He gave the buildings structure with powerful squiggles. The hastily captured skyline is not explicitly dated. But the reverse side gives us a clue. Wolf drew on a sheet of German weekly calendar. The dates here indicate that the sketch was composed in 1938, the year of Wolf's emigration to the United States.