Seligman moved from his native Basel to Paris in 1927. He was a part of the Abstraction-Création movement and exhibited with the Surrealists. In 1937, he joined the Surrealist movement. He left for New York in 1939, being joined there by many other "artists in exile" who had fled war and persecution in Europe.

The drawing depicts a strange figure of biomorphic abstract forms ascending a sharply raked platform or stage. From the 1930s, Seligmann had developed a style based on his interest in fantastic elements in Northern Renaissance graphic art and the carnival. Such works frequently lend his art the appearance of an organic danse macabre. In 1948, critic Tom Hess described Seligmann's work as a fusion of magic and science where, "gesticulating figures and objects act out their dramas." The wanderers and spiritual forces conjured out of these anthropomorphic configurations suggest Seligmann's belief in the artist as an interpreter of the essentially tragic fate of man.