Cabeza is Spanish for head, and the choice of the Spanish title in a work from 1982 is consistent with Basquiat's practice of moving between languages — English, Spanish, and French appearing across his output as a reflection of the Caribbean and immigrant New York world he grew up in, where language itself was a marker of identity, belonging, and exclusion. The head in this screenprint is not a self-portrait in any literal sense, but it carries the energy of someone placing themselves in the image — the wide eyes and exposed teeth less an expression of aggression than of absolute alertness, the figure watching back with the same attention being directed at it.

Basquiat's heads from this period drew on sources as far apart as African masks, anatomical diagrams, and the skull imagery that runs through Western art from Holbein onwards — but what he made from those sources was entirely his own, a kind of portraiture that located identity in the structure of the face rather than in its social expression, the skull and the living person occupying the same image simultaneously. Portfolio II was issued posthumously in 2004 by his Estate in an edition of 85, nearly two decades after Basquiat made the original works that the series preserves.

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