Baby (Wiege)

This is among the last things Gustav Klimt painted. He had a stroke early in 1918 and died that February, as the First World War ground toward its end. Almost his whole career had gone into portraits of elegant Vienna women wrapped in gold and pattern. Here instead is a baby, its small face and one hand barely showing at the top of a steep pyramid of blankets. The heaped quilts are really the painting, a tumbling mosaic of blue, green, pink and yellow that carries all the color he usually spent on jewelry and gowns. The tiny sleeping face at the summit is easy to miss at first glance.