BROAD STROKES

Supreme Court Takes Up Fight Over Andy Warhol’s Prince Paintings

Photographer Lynn Goldsmith sued the late artist’s estate, alleging that Warhol had violated copyright laws by creating his Prince painting from her photograph.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to take on a copyright case involving the Andy Warhol Foundation and the late artist’s 1984 painting of Prince known as “Orange Prince.” The dispute began in 2017 when photographer Lynn Goldsmith sued the estate, alleging that Warhol, who died in 1987, had violated copyright laws by modeling his rendering of Prince from her 1981 photo of the rockstar that appeared in Newsweek. The Manhattan court sided with Warhol, deciding that the painter had sufficiently transformed the image so that it did not infringe on Goldsmith’s work, Reuters reports. But when Goldsmith appealed, she found favor with the judge who agreed that Warhol’s painting did not have enough “new artistic purpose and character” to distinguish it from Goldsmith’s photo. The Supreme Court, however, agreed to accept the Warhol Foundation’s appeal of the appeal, arguing that to ultimately side with the photographer would cast a “cloud of legal uncertainty” around the entire nature of Warhol’s type of art.