Klimt’s Baby (Cradle) looks like a portrait of someone trying to get rid of their baby via laundry chute and reasoning that the more colorful the blankets, the less the baby would stick out as something not machine washable.

This is probably not the case. What is more likely is that this is one of Klimt’s own children because he had approximately 14 +/- of them with various ladies/models/muses. Apparently part of Klimt’s artistic routine was impregnating models after painting them. But to each their own I guess. For this reason though it was rare that he would ever paint children. What’s the point of painting someone you can’t sleep with, right? They just really weren’t his thing despite his serial fatherhood.

What also wasn’t his thing during his later career was painting people lying down. Seeing as this is a baby and he/she for sure can’t walk yet, he didn’t have much of a choice. But painting a baby did allow Klimt to put on full display his Klimtness by giving him most of the canvas for blankets and quilts full of vibrant patterns, shapes and colors. Therein lies his genius. The amount of color in what potentially could have been a super boring painting is just astonishing. The contrasting reds and greens, yellows and purples, and oranges and blues are what make this painting so shockingly colorful to the point that you hardly notice the teeny little baby head at the top of the pile. Maybe Klimt was trying to have one less kid to feed…

To our knowledge no baby was lost in the creation of this painting. It did however serve as the basis for all of the laundry basket photography that is so popular amongst young moms and fabric softener brands these days. We don’t know what is so cute about babies in a pile of clean towels, but goddamn it of we don’t giggle every time we see it.