Court sides with photog in fight over Warhol art
A U.S. appeals court sided with a photographer Friday in her copyright dispute over how a foundation has marketed a series of Andy Warhol works of art based on her pictures of Prince.
The New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the artwork created by Warhol before his 1987 death was not transformative and could not overcome obligations to photographer Lynn Goldsmith’s copyright protections. It returned the case to a lower court for further proceedings.
Warhol created a series of 16 artworks based on a 1981 picture of Prince that was taken by Goldsmith, a pioneering photographer known for portraits of famous musicians. The series contained 12 silkscreen paintings, two screen prints on paper and two drawings.
“Crucially, the Prince Series retains the essential elements of the Goldsmith Photograph without significantly adding to or altering those elements,” the 2nd Circuit said in a decision written by Judge Gerard E. Lynch.
The decision overturned a 2019 ruling by a Manhattan judge who concluded that Warhol’s renderings were so different from Goldsmith’s photograph that they transcended Goldsmith’s copyrights.
U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl in Manhattan had concluded that Warhol transformed a picture of a vulnerable and uncomfortable Prince into an artwork that made the singer an “iconic, larger-than-life figure.”
In 1984, Vanity Fair licensed one of Goldsmith’s black-and-white studio portraits of Prince from her December 1981 shoot for $400 and commissioned Warhol to create an illustration of Prince for an article titled “Purple Fame.”
The dispute emerged after Prince’s 2016 death, when the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts licensed the use of Warhol’s Prince series for use in a magazine commemorating Prince’s life. One of Warhol’s creations was on the cover of the May 2016 magazine.
Goldsmith claimed that the publication of the Warhol artwork destroyed a high-profile licensing opportunity.
Attorney Luke Nikas said the Warhol Foundation will challenge the ruling.