Head of the Mandible, from the Anatomy portfolio by Jean-Michel Basquiat places its subject — the condylar process at the top of the lower jaw, the articulating point where the mandible meets the skull — in the centre of the sheet with roughly three quarters of the black ground left empty around it. The drawing is small, specific, and slightly difficult to read at first glance, the form closer to a clenched hand or a crouching figure than to anything obviously bone-like, until the label anchors it.

The mandible is the only bone in the skull that moves. It is the mechanism of speech, of eating, of expression — the part of the head through which a person makes themselves understood and takes in what they need to survive. To isolate its head, the joint point rather than the whole bone, and to place it this small against this much darkness, is to make the most reduced image in the portfolio while choosing a subject that carries more functional weight than almost any other bone in the body.

Basquiat's relationship to language — written, spoken, graffitied, crossed out, copyrighted, appropriated — runs through everything he made, and the jaw is the anatomical instrument of the spoken word, the physical mechanism that the body uses to form and release language into the world. That the Anatomy portfolio, a series built entirely on naming and labelling, includes a drawing of the bone most associated with the act of speaking is the kind of quiet observation that rewards a collector looking carefully. Jean-Michel Basquiat produced the portfolio in 1982 in an edition of 18 — among the most restricted of any work in his printed output.

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