Three Views of the Shoulder Joint Opened, from the Anatomy portfolio by Jean-Michel Basquiat shows the shoulder from three angles — the joint as it appears closed, partly opened, and fully opened, the progression moving from left to right across the lower half of the sheet. The word OPENED in the title is the significant one. This is not the shoulder as it presents itself but the shoulder as it appears when a surgeon or an anatomist has gone inside it, the interior made visible through an act of cutting.

The shoulder is the most mobile joint in the human body and consequently the most vulnerable — capable of a greater range of movement than any other joint, and more susceptible to dislocation because of it. To open it is to understand why, to see the architecture of a structure whose freedom of movement is inseparable from its instability. Grey's Anatomy approached this with the logic of the engineer examining a mechanism, the opened joint revealing what the closed joint conceals.

Basquiat's three drawings are quick and gestural, the joint in each view recognisable but not precise, the forms carrying the quality of someone sketching from memory rather than from a specimen. The 1 that precedes the title — 1 3 VIEWS OF THE SHOULDER JOINT OPENED — is unexplained, a numbering that implies a sequence without completing it, the same quality of incompleteness that runs through the portfolio as a whole. The body is never fully accounted for. There is always another view, another condition, another angle from which the structure looks different and reveals something the previous drawing could not show. Jean-Michel Basquiat made the Anatomy portfolio in 1982 in an edition of 18 — the smallest of any work in his printed output.

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