Femur, from the Anatomy portfolio by Jean-Michel Basquiat gives the longest bone in the body its own sheet — drawn back view, labelled, with the patella numbered in three positions to its left and the vertical median and hip joint diagrammed separately to the right. Four elements on a black ground, spaced with the care of someone who understood that the relationship between objects in space is itself a form of argument.

The femur is the bone most associated with human locomotion — the structural pivot between the body's weight and its movement through the world. In the context of an eighteen-print portfolio made in 1982 by a young Black artist who had spent his adolescence moving through the streets of lower Manhattan on foot, sleeping rough, covering ground between neighbourhoods and social worlds that the city's infrastructure was not designed to connect equally, the choice to draw this bone in particular carries a weight the clinical terminology alone does not.

Basquiat had been drawing bones since childhood, the vocabulary of Grey's Anatomy absorbed so early that it became genuinely his own rather than borrowed. What distinguishes the Anatomy portfolio from the skeletal forms that appear across his paintings is the deliberate adoption of the diagram format — the black ground, the white line, the labels — as the whole image rather than one element within a denser one. The sparseness is the point. Each print in the portfolio places a single component of the body in a field where nothing competes with it, where the only question is what it means to draw this bone, name it, and present it on a ground that looks like a blackboard in an anatomy class whose students are not specified.

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