Ramus of Mandible, from the Anatomy portfolio by Jean-Michel Basquiat places a single skull in white line against a deep black ground — annotated with FORAMEN MAGNUM, FRONTAL, TEMPORAL, ZYGOMATIC, VOMER, and at the lower left RAMUS OF MANDIBLE itself. The skull occupies perhaps a quarter of the image; the rest is black. The labels extend outward on thin lines in the manner of a medical diagram, each one naming a component of the structure with the authority of a textbook — and each one rendered in Basquiat's own hand, the letters uneven, the spacing irregular, the lines loose where a scientific illustration would be precise.

The Anatomy portfolio was Basquiat's first sustained engagement with printmaking, produced in 1982 in an edition of 18 — among the most restricted of any work in his output. Across its eighteen silkscreens, each isolating a different component of the human body against the same black ground, Basquiat works in a register almost entirely absent from his paintings: no crowns, no crossed-out words, no layered references to jazz or empire or commodity culture. Just the body, named and diagrammed, the hand visible in every mark.

The source was Grey's Anatomy, a copy of which was given to Basquiat as a child while he was recovering in hospital after being struck by a car. He kept it. The book's presence runs through his entire output — in the skeletal figures, the anatomical fragments, the recurring teeth and bones that appear across paintings from 1981 onwards — but nowhere more directly than in the Anatomy portfolio, where the diagrammatic format of medical illustration is adopted wholesale and then quietly undermined by the irreducible fact of the artist's hand. To name a bone is to claim knowledge of it. To name it this way is to show how provisional that knowledge always is.

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