Three Different Conditions of Biceps Muscle, from the Anatomy portfolio by Jean-Michel Basquiat is the only print in the series that shows the same structure in multiple states rather than multiple views — three drawings of the biceps arranged across the sheet, the muscle at different degrees of contraction, the title misspelled: THREE DIFFENENT CONDITIONS. The error stays, signed.

The biceps is the muscle most associated in popular culture with physical strength — the flexed arm, the demonstration of force, the body asserting its power visibly. Grey's Anatomy presented it clinically, diagramming its conditions as a matter of mechanical function. Basquiat draws those same conditions loosely, the three states distinguished more by gesture than by anatomical precision, the differences between them felt rather than measured.

Basquiat's engagement with the athlete as a figure runs through his entire output — Sugar Ray Robinson, Hank Aaron, the boxer and the sprinter as people whose physical power generated enormous value for others while the mechanisms of that extraction remained invisible. The biceps is the athlete's most visible instrument, and to draw it in three conditions — flexed, extended, at rest — is to draw the muscle at work, the muscle between efforts, and the muscle after. The Anatomy portfolio rarely shows the body in motion; this is the exception, the one print in the series where the subject is not a structure but a state.

The misspelling DIFFENENT sits in the same category as LELFT SIDE OF LOWER JAW elsewhere in the portfolio — the hand moving at the speed of thought rather than orthographic convention, the error left because correcting it would have meant something different than leaving it.

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