Editing Paul Klee (section)

===Trip to Tunis, 1914===
Klee's artistic breakthrough came in 1914 when he briefly visited Tunisia with [[August Macke]] and [[Louis Moilliet]] and was impressed by the quality of the light there.  He wrote, "Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever... Color and I are one. I am a painter."<ref name="Partsch, p. 20">Partsch, p. 20</ref> With that realization, faithfulness to nature faded in importance. Instead, Klee began to delve into the "cool romanticism of abstraction".<ref name="Partsch, p. 20"/> In gaining a second artistic vocabulary, Klee added color to his abilities in draftsmanship, and in many works combined them successfully, as he did in one series he called "operatic paintings".<ref>Partsch, pp. 24–25</ref><ref>Kagan, p. 33</ref> One of the most literal examples of this new synthesis is ''The Bavarian Don Giovanni'' (1919).<ref>Kagan, p. 35</ref>

After returning home, Klee painted his first pure abstract, ''In the Style of Kairouan'' (1914), composed of colored rectangles and a few circles.<ref>Partsch, p. 27</ref> The colored rectangle became his basic building block, what some scholars associate with a musical note, which Klee combined with other colored blocks to create a color harmony analogous to a musical composition. His selection of a particular color palette emulates a musical key. Sometimes he uses complementary pairs of colors, and other times "dissonant" colors, again reflecting his connection with musicality.<ref>Kagan, pp. 27, 29.</ref>