Jean-Michel Basquiat
30.0 × 22.2 in
Right Humerus, from the Anatomy portfolio by Jean-Michel Basquiat is the most exhaustive study in the series — four views of the same bone arranged side by side, front, back, outer side, and inner side, the full rotation completed in a single image. Where other prints in the portfolio offer one or two perspectives, this one turns the humerus through every angle, the bone seen completely from all sides before the image ends.
The humerus is the bone of the upper arm — the structure that connects the shoulder to the elbow, that transmits the force generated by the shoulder muscles into the movements of the forearm and hand. It is the bone through which a painter's gesture originates, the structural relay between intention and mark. That Basquiat drew it four times, more thoroughly than any other bone in the portfolio, and placed the four views in a row that reads like a rotation — the same object seen from every side — is consistent with how he approached everything he was most interested in, turning it until he had seen all of it.
Grey's Anatomy presented the humerus with exactly this logic, multiple views necessary to understand a three-dimensional structure that no single drawing could fully capture. Basquiat's four drawings are looser than the textbook's, the proportions slightly variable between views, the lines carrying the evidence of a hand moving quickly across the sheet. But the structure of the knowledge — the understanding that a bone must be seen from all sides before it is understood — is identical. The Anatomy portfolio is the work in which Basquiat was most explicitly a student, and Right Humerus is the print where that quality of attention is most visible.
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