Gustav Wolf was a prolific printmaker, who had taught at the Baden Art School in Karlsruhe in 1920. He then worked as a freelancer and in addition to commercial graphics, created his own visionary graphic works. Wolf spent most of the last years before his emigration from Germany outside of his home country. At times he lived as a lodger at the house of Hilde Domin in Rome. He also travelled to Sicily, through Greece and several times to Switzerland. From 1933, however, as a Jew, he felt that he was "surrounded by invisible glass prison walls" in Germany. By 1936, he had already auctioned off all his furniture, including his printing press, between two trips abroad and boarded a ship to New York in February 1938 where he offered his services as a commercial artist and also worked on a chicken farm.

Wolf created hundreds of prints before he and his wife left New York in 1942 and moved to the refugee hostel in Cummington, where their friend Jacob Picard had had good experiences. There a local publisher of book art employed Wolft as a graphic designer. Finally, Wolf took on a job as an art teacher at a girls' school at Northfield in Massachusetts. After the war he had the opportunity to return to Germany, receiving an offer to become a professor at the Karlsruhe Art Academy but due to the onset of diabetes, he never went.