High court to hear case about Andy Warhol art, Prince photo

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to overview a copyright dispute involving operates of artwork by the artist Andy Warhol that were based on a photograph of the musician Prince.

A lower courtroom had at 1st mentioned the artwork established in advance of Warhol’s 1987 death was “fair use” of the photograph by Lynn Goldsmith due to the fact it had reworked the initial do the job. But the New York-centered 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed. The Supreme Courtroom stated it would evaluation that ruling. The circumstance will be argued someday soon after the court commences its new term in Oct.

Warhol made a sequence of 16 artworks based on a 1981 image of Prince taken by Goldsmith, a groundbreaking photographer acknowledged for portraits of popular musicians. The collection came about just after Vanity Good commissioned Warhol to generate an illustration of Prince in 1984 to accompany a journal article.

The journal paid out $400 to license Goldsmith’s photograph for Warhol to use as a reference to produce his have work. The agreement restricted the use of the photograph to the one occasion in the magazine and needed Self-importance Reasonable to give credit history to Goldsmith, among other issues. In 2016, just after Prince’s demise, the magazine posted a tribute challenge with 1 of Warhol’s is effective on the deal with. It did not contain credit to Goldsmith. Goldsmith has said it was only then that she became conscious of the Prince collection.

The dispute the court docket agreed to hear is in between the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, which now licenses Warhol’s performs, and Goldsmith.