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Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled 5 (from Leonardo), 1983

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Untitled 5 (from Leonardo), 1983
Screen prints on Okawara paper
88.3 × 76.2 cm
34.8 × 30.0 in
Edition of 45 plus 4 AP
Series: Leonardo
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Jean-Michel Basquiat's Untitled 5 (from Leonardo) closes the portfolio with its most explicitly historical image — a grouping of skulls and bones arranged around the designation PLATE FOUR, with a...
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Jean-Michel Basquiat's Untitled 5 (from Leonardo) closes the portfolio with its most explicitly historical image — a grouping of skulls and bones arranged around the designation PLATE FOUR, with a boxed Latin inscription at the base of the sheet drawn from Andreas Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica, the foundational text of modern anatomical science published in 1543. Leonardo and Vesalius are the two figures who between them established the Western tradition of understanding the body through systematic visual study, and Basquiat places both in the same frame — not to celebrate that tradition but to examine what it was built on and who it excluded.

De Humani Corporis Fabrica was revolutionary in its insistence on direct observation over received authority, its illustrations made from actual dissections rather than classical texts. The bodies dissected in Renaissance anatomy were overwhelmingly those of executed criminals — people whose deaths the state had already claimed, whose bodies passed into scientific use without consent. Basquiat, whose entire career was an investigation into who owns the body, whose labour generates value, and whose image gets reproduced and circulated by others, is not quoting Vesalius neutrally.

The skulls and bones scattered across the open Okawara sheet are neither precise enough to function as diagrams nor loose enough to read as purely expressive — they sit in the space between study and disruption that defines the Leonardo portfolio as a whole. Untitled 5 (from Leonardo) is the print that makes the stakes of that position most explicit, the Renaissance anatomical tradition named, quoted, and quietly placed under scrutiny.

For more information or to buy Untitled 5 (from Leonardo) by Jean-Michel Basquiat, contact our specialists using the enquiry button above.

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