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COMPOSITION 1931 PAUL KLEE TERRIBLE BEASTS 1926 As much as his parents pushed him to embrace a life of music, he found equal pleasure flling sketchbook after sketchbook, mostly with drawings of Swiss landscapes. Though he wrote with his right hand, he drew with his left, and his compositions were either meticulously detailed and resolutely realist or satirical, fueled by his welldeveloped sense of humor. When he fnished secondary school, he decided he lacked the talent to become a violinist of the frst order, and he opted for art school instead. He chose Munich, then the center of the German art world, over Paris. Arriving in Bavaria in 1898, he frequented the opera and continued to play chamber music. Interestingly, as art historian Susanna Partsch notes in her monograph Paul Klee, 1879– 1940: Poet of Colours, Master of Lines, though he rejected the rules of academic art and evolved into a radically modern visual artist, he never embraced modern composers, remaining loyal to the great European classical composers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Music would always fgure prominently in his life and was most likely a catalyst in his later turn toward abstraction—music is, after all, an abstract art. His paintings at times resembled musical patterns made visual; his drawings looked as if his pencil were moving rhythmically. Violin practice often trumped painting in his studio, where he would sometimes turn his easel into a music stand. As his Bauhaus colleague Lyonel Feininger once said, "Klee the painter is unthinkable without Klee the musician." Klee also indulged in a young man's classic extracurricular pursuit of female companionship, scor- ing numerous sexual conquests in Munich. "Put simply, frst and foremost I had to become a person; art world follow," Klee said. One dalliance led to pregnancy; his son died as a newborn. The Bavarian Don Giovanni (1919), painted when he was forty, looks back at his rakish youth with the names of women he desired and those he succeeded in seducing. A small fgure of a man wearing a dandyish hat climbs a ladder to an abstractly rendered window marked "Mari." In 1899, Klee met a pianist named Lily Stumpf, whom he courted in a more socially acceptable bourgeois style. They played music together and later struck a secret engagement. As a student, he excelled in drawing. He would later famously remark, "Drawing is taking a line for a walk." Even in his youth, his lines were graceful and fuid. Painting, however, gave him fts, as he struggled with color. He took to sculpture, experimenting with plasticine and clay, but when the sculpture professor at the Academy of Fine Arts snubbed him, demanding Klee take an entrance exam before being accepted into the class, he abandoned his quest to study it formally. In 1901, after spending six months in Italy taking in the Old Masters, Klee returned home to Bern, where once again he began performing the violin, even touring with the Bern Music Society. As an artist, though, he worked in near total isolation. Bern was not one of Europe's art capitals, and he did not enjoy the direct discourse or studio visits with other artists common in locales like Paris or Munich. He was also apart from Lily, who remained in Munich. Self-doubt made him nearly suicidal with depression. The names he bestowed on In 1910, already thirty, Klee had his frst solo show. Composed of ffty-six works, it opened in his hometown of Bern and traveled to Zurich, Winterthur, and Basel. Slowly but surely, his art began to sell. 56 Tempus-Magazine.com . Fall 2013