Posterior View, from the Anatomy portfolio by Jean-Michel Basquiat draws the arm from behind — scapula, humerus, ulna, and ramus visible from the back, the limb rendered in a single loose line that runs from the shoulder joint down to the forearm, the labels extending outward with the same quick hand that marks every print in this series. It is the third view of the arm in the portfolio, completing a rotation that has moved from front to side to back, the same structure seen from three different positions across three separate sheets.

The posterior view is the view of the body that the body itself cannot see without assistance — the back, the blind side, the angle that requires a mirror or another person to access. Grey's Anatomy included posterior views precisely because complete anatomical knowledge required accounting for what was not directly visible, the understanding of a structure depending on the ability to move around it rather than fix it in a single perspective. Basquiat applies the same logic across the Anatomy portfolio, the three views of the arm building a knowledge of the limb that no single image could provide.

There is something in the posterior view's particular quality of exposure — the body seen from the angle it cannot defend — that runs through Basquiat's work more broadly. The figures in his paintings are frequently opened, examined, and made available to a gaze they did not invite. The Anatomy portfolio frames that condition in its most formal and restrained terms, the black ground and white line offering no context beyond the bone and the label and the view from which it is being seen.

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