Lateral View, from the Anatomy portfolio by Jean-Michel Basquiat draws the arm from a different angle than Anterior View — the same bones, scapula to phalanges, but rotated ninety degrees so the limb is seen from the side, the radius and ulna now visible as two distinct structures running parallel between the elbow and the wrist. Where the anterior view presents the arm as it faces the world, the lateral view shows its depth, the dimension that only becomes visible when you move around it.

Grey's Anatomy, the book Basquiat was given as a child while recovering in hospital, presented the body systematically through exactly this logic — multiple views of each structure, the same bone drawn from the front, the side, and the back, the understanding built through accumulation of perspectives rather than any single definitive image. Basquiat absorbed that approach so thoroughly that when he came to make the Anatomy portfolio in 1982, the decision to include multiple views of the same structure felt less like a formal choice than a natural extension of how he had always thought about the body. The lateral view is not supplementary to the anterior view — it is the next necessary angle.

Basquiat understood perspective as a political condition as much as a visual one. The view from the front is not neutral; it is the view the institution offers, the official angle. The lateral view is what you see when you step to the side — and stepping to the side of official perspectives had defined his relationship to every institution he had encountered, from the Brooklyn schools that failed to hold his attention to the downtown art world that was simultaneously celebrating and categorising him. Lateral View is a screenprint produced in an edition of 18 — one of the rarest things Jean-Michel Basquiat made during his lifetime.

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