Untitled 4 (from Leonardo) by Jean-Michel Basquiat returns to the spine — the same subject as Untitled 1, but in an entirely different key. Here the vertebral column sits at the lower centre of the sheet surrounded by broad, sweeping gestural marks that arc across much of the Okawara paper, their scale dwarfing the precise anatomical form below them. The spine is careful; everything around it is not. The contrast between the two is the print's argument.

Basquiat developed the Leonardo portfolio through a process that allowed accident a structural role — working on transparent acetates left on the studio floor, accumulating marks from paint, debris, and contact with other surfaces before transfer into silkscreen. The sweeping forms that surround the spine in Untitled 4 are products of that process, marks that arrived through physical circumstance rather than intention and were retained in the final print rather than removed. Basquiat's decision to keep them — to treat the accident as part of the work — reflects a consistent position across his career: that the conditions of making are as significant as the thing made.

Leonardo believed that the act of drawing was itself a form of knowledge, that to draw a body accurately was to understand it. Basquiat's version of that belief looks quite different — knowledge here is provisional, the precise form surrounded and partly overwhelmed by marks that arrived without being planned. Jean-Michel Basquiat produced the Untitled Portfolio (from Leonardo) in 1983, at the moment his international reputation was at its most rapid ascent, and the quietness of this suite sits in deliberate contrast to the noise around him.

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