Jean-Michel Basquiat
30.0 × 22.2 in (each)
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The Complete Anatomy Portfolio by Jean-Michel Basquiat is his first and most formally restrained body of work in print — eighteen silkscreens, each isolating a single component of the human skeleton against a deep black ground in white chalk-like line. Skulls, bones, joints, and muscle conditions are named, annotated, and diagrammed with the economy of someone who had spent years studying the body from the outside and understood exactly how medical illustration worked — and exactly how to inhabit its conventions while refusing its authority.
The portfolio was made in 1982 in an edition of 18, produced in collaboration with Annina Nosei's gallery on Prince Street, where Basquiat had been given a basement studio. The conditions of that arrangement — a young Black artist working in a cellar while his gallerist managed access to the space and the collectors who came to watch him work — gave the body-as-subject a particular charge. Basquiat had been given a copy of Grey's Anatomy as a child while recovering in hospital after being struck by a car, and the book's influence runs through his entire output. But the Anatomy portfolio is the work in which that influence is most directly and economically expressed — the diagrams stripped of everything except the bone, the label, and the line of his hand making it.
What separates the Anatomy portfolio from scientific illustration is precisely what it shares with it — the format, the terminology, the black ground that mimics a chalkboard or a teaching aid — and the gap that opens between that format and the hand that is executing it. Basquiat's lines are not imprecise because he lacked the skill to make them otherwise. They are what they are because the body being drawn was never simply a medical specimen, and the act of naming its parts was never a neutral one.
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