The Untitled Portfolio (from Leonardo) by Jean-Michel Basquiat is a suite of five silkscreens in which Basquiat enters into direct dialogue with Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical investigations. The imagery is sparse throughout: a spinal column beneath "PLATE TEN," teeth and skull fragments clustered under the word "TEETH," loosely rendered figures annotated "HERO" and "YOUTH BECOMING A RIGHTLEG," a broad gestural sweep across an open field. The restraint is deliberate — this is among the most reduced work Basquiat made in any medium.

The prints were developed with publisher Fred Hoffman, who introduced Basquiat to Leonardo's drawings during their studio collaborations. Basquiat sketched onto transparent acetates, left them on the studio floor to accumulate incidental marks from paint and debris, then transferred them into silkscreen. Those traces remain visible across all five sheets. The Okawara paper — warm, fibrous, close in feeling to the surfaces of Renaissance draughtsmanship — was Basquiat's own choice.

By 1983 Basquiat was operating at the centre of the New York art world — collaborating with Warhol, showing with Gagosian and Mary Boone, his paintings moving through auction at prices that had no precedent for an artist his age. The Leonardo portfolio sits outside that context. Crossed-out plate numbers gesture toward anatomical cataloguing conventions while refusing them; the subjects echo Leonardo's investigative drawings but the sparseness and the studio accident embedded in each sheet push the works away from study toward something more personal. Basquiat had carried a copy of Grey's Anatomy since childhood, and the body runs through his output as both physical fact and conceptual territory — in the anatomy of power, race, and the Black figure as much as in bone and sinew. The Leonardo portfolio distils that preoccupation to its quietest register, producing prints more compressed than almost anything else he made.

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