The Scapula, from the Anatomy portfolio by Jean-Michel Basquiat draws two things — the scapula itself on the left, broad and triangular, and to its right a smaller drawing labelled AUX. BORDER, an auxiliary detail isolated and placed beside the main form as a footnote to the larger bone. The number 1 sits to the left of the scapula's label, implying a sequence that the image does not complete. Two structures, a number, a label, and the rest is black.

The scapula appears throughout the Anatomy portfolio as part of other images — in Anterior View, Lateral View, and Posterior View it marks the top of the arm, the origin point from which the whole limb descends. Here it is given its own sheet, extracted from the context of the arm it anchors and examined in isolation. The auxiliary border — the lateral edge of the scapula, the thickest part of the bone where the muscles that power the arm attach — is given its own subsidiary drawing, the detail that matters most to function separated out and shown apart.

Basquiat had a consistent interest in the detail that gets overlooked — the auxiliary border rather than the main bone, the auxiliary credit rather than the headline, the contribution that makes the primary thing possible and rarely receives acknowledgement. The AUX. abbreviation is the kind of shorthand that fills Grey's Anatomy, the clinical economy of a text that assumes its reader already knows the importance of what is being abbreviated. That Basquiat chose to draw the auxiliary border separately, to give it its own label and its own space on the sheet, is a small observation that the portfolio rewards a collector patient enough to notice.

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