The Daily Slice: These Babies are More Badass than You

The world is overflowing with beautiful and interesting things competing for our attention, and if you live in the real world, it’s a tall task to include appreciating the hell out of art on a daily basis. Really, who can find the time? That’s why Guy.com offers a “daily slice.” It’s a small taste of what’s going on in the world of art and design–something we find beautiful or inspiring or worthy of a peek. We’re happy to serve it up.

You’ve got to be familiar with Anne Geddes work. This is because you simply can’t walk through a book store these days without encountering at least one calendar with her cute sleeping babies on it. She’s everywhere — journals, coffee cups, calendars… and she isn’t finished ramming the kitsch novelty market full of armies of the tiniest sleeping men and women on earth. They’re flowery and cute and exist to stab us directly in the quadrant of the heart reserved for family ties and heart strings and whatnot. We get it. We may not care, but we get it. And we’re tired of it.

Images by Anne Geddes

Welcome to the most badass baby boys depicted in history.

Fold up your tripod, Geddes, because J.C. Leyendecker’s babies from the 1930′s and 40′s are marching in with machine guns and gas masks. Literally. Imagine going to your local Barnes and Nobles bookstore to pick up your current Babies At War calendar, because that’s what this shit was like 70 years ago. This would have been the cover:

The man with the paintbrush responsible for these manly tykes is J. C. Leyendecker. Unless you’ve studied illustration in art school, you’ve probably never heard of him. You know Norman Rockwell, right? He’s known for nearly fifty years of Saturday Evening Post illustrations, the last of his 322 illustrated covers being published in 1963. Well, J. C. Leyendecker came before Norman Rockwell. If you’re not sure what the Saturday Evening Post even was, think of it as our Time Magazine or Newsweek today. It was the most widely circulated weekly magazine in America all the way through WWII.

Badass: babies weilding weapons. Priceless: vintage child endangerment. Click to enlarge.

If artists could be gangsters, this man would be Carlo Gambino, only on the good side of the law. He was an extremely well-paid artist that illustrated for the Saturday Evening Post for 44 years (starting in 1899) and lived the decadent lifestyle of the Roaring Twenties. He was so talented that he painted himself into a mansion fit for a senator.

He painted a new baby every year for the New Year’s edition of the Post, and began a tradition of diapered boys that could really fuck things up, not to mention seduce your woman and build stuff you couldn’t dream of. They were inventors, adventures and thinkers. They weren’t surrounded by flowers; a Leyendecker baby was surrounded by war and had a bayonet on hand in the play pen right next to his (most likely rum-filled) bottle.

The Leyendecker baby was kissing your women, partying like a rockstar, and knew how to fix the sink. Click to enlarge.

You brought me a puzzle, mom? Fuck you, because I just flew a plane.

Leyendecker’s imagination challenges our modern ideas of childhood and innocence and stirs our collective fear of child endangerment and lawsuits that seems to belong only to today. Perhaps it’s strange that we’re zoning in on pictures of cute babies right now, but there’s not much cute about these guys if you think about it. Doubtfully any of these images would get past an editor today.

Expect the mind of an engineer and a superhero wrapped up in a tiny man's body. Click to enlarge.

Who are the babies now? You’re damn right, it’s us. These guys are bigger men than us. The generation that parented these tykes survived (or didn’t) the Great Depression as children and were forced into war as adults. They had no choice. It’s easy to think of the past as nicer times, but that’s not quite the case. Every generation has their challenges and their disasters. But before you think that nostalgia paints everything pink, think again. Leyendecker painted rosy cheeks, but he handed those rosy cheeked children guns.

The capable babies of Leyendecker. Click to enlarge.

Geddes’ work represents our privileged presence, if not simply our chosen isolation. Her babies have been returned to earth and folded back into flowers and nuts, re-incubating and insulating our young from harsh reality. They sleep, unaware of the world around them. There are no inventors. No explorers. No tiny warriors. Our babies are planted flowers, ironically ringed in safe soil, never to move from the pot. The imagery of our generation gives way to cherubs and animals, not warriors. There is no kinetic energy in Geddes’ images — only mostly sleep and smiles.

At first glance, Leyendecker’s imagery is whimsical and reminiscent of Hallmark. Yet today it would be banned. Whimsical your ass, sir. These babies are more badass than you.