Female Pelvis, Back View, from the Anatomy portfolio by Jean-Michel Basquiat gives the pelvis more space than the bone occupies — the structure sits in the lower half of the black ground, small against the dark, with FEMALE PELVIS underlined above it and BACK VIEW and FOURTH LUMBAR VERTEBRA annotated below. The underline beneath the title is the most emphatic mark in the image, more definitive than the bone drawing itself, as though the act of labelling requires more force than the act of depicting.

The female pelvis appears once in this portfolio and the male pelvis appears once — the same bone, the same clinical format, the same black ground, classified and separated. The history of gynaecology and obstetric medicine in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was one in which the bodies of Black and enslaved women were used as experimental subjects without consent, the foundational techniques of modern obstetric surgery developed on women who had no choice in the matter. That Basquiat drew this bone in 1982 in the same format he used for every other bone in the portfolio — with the same economy of line, the same visible hand, the same refusal to resolve into precision — does not make it a painting about that history. But the Anatomy portfolio was never simply about anatomy, and the choice to include both pelvises, named and categorised, as part of a series that was already questioning what it means to classify the body, is not incidental.

The portfolio was produced in an edition of 18 in collaboration with Annina Nosei's gallery — Basquiat's first sustained engagement with printmaking, and the series in which the body as subject is most directly and economically addressed across his entire printed output.

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