Jean-Michel Basquiat
34.8 × 30.0 in
Jean-Michel Basquiat's Untitled 2 (from Leonardo) is the most fragmented image in the suite — teeth, skull fragments, and bone forms scattered across the open Okawara ground, with plate numbers written and crossed out beneath them, a sweeping gestural mark dominating the upper half of the sheet. Where Untitled 1 gives a single form in a vast space, this print feels as though the body has come apart in transit, its components distributed across the page without resolving into a coherent diagram.
Teeth recur throughout Basquiat's output as one of his most loaded motifs — present in the crowned heads, the mask-like figures, the anatomical studies across the Anatomy portfolio. They are simultaneously a sign of life, of aggression, of the body's interior made visible, and of the skull beneath the face. Leonardo drew teeth with extraordinary precision in his anatomical manuscripts; Basquiat draws them quickly, labelling them with a single word and surrounding them with the debris of other studies. The authority of the label and the looseness of the mark are in constant tension.
The crossed-out plate numbers are characteristic of how Basquiat treated classification throughout his career — acknowledging a system of organisation and immediately disrupting it, so that the act of categorisation becomes as visible as the thing being categorised. In the Leonardo portfolio, that disruption is particularly pointed: the conventions of Renaissance anatomical illustration are invoked and then quietly refused, the body refusing to stay in its assigned place on the page.
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