Paintings of the musition prince6/18/2023 ![]() ![]() Their suit said Goldsmith was trying to “shake down” the foundation. ![]() The foundation argued that Warhol’s works were transformative because they conveyed a different “meaning or message” than the original work. Judges unsuited as art critics?Īfter Goldsmith complained about the use of her image, the Warhol Foundation filed a pre-emptive lawsuit, seeking a declaratory judgment that the entire Prince Series was fair use under copyright law. Lynn Goldsmith took this photo of Prince, which is the subject of a Supreme Court copyright case. “I went and looked at my digital archive and went, those are the eyes.” “What I rarely forget in my pictures is somebody’s eyes, and I kept seeing that image come up on various social networks, the quote-unquote Warhol, in different colors,” Goldsmith said in a deposition. (She has claimed that she was unaware that her 1981 photo had been the basis for Warhol’s Prince Series.) Goldsmith noticed the image and realized it was based on her 1981 photo of Prince that had been licensed to Vanity Fair as an artist’s reference and complained to the Warhol Foundation. When Prince died of an accidental drug overdose in 2016, Vanity Fair’s parent, Condé Nast, published a commemorative magazine called “The Genius of Prince,” which used another of Warhol’s series on the cover, one known as “Orange Prince.” (The 1984 Vanity Fair article had used “Purple Prince.”) “Unlike Goldsmith’s focus on the individual subject’s unique human identity, … Warhol’s portraits … sought to use the flattened, cropped, exotically colored and unnatural depiction of Prince’s disembodied head to communicate a message about the impact of celebrity and defining the contemporary conditions of life.” “Warhol’s portraits of Prince are materially distinct in their meaning and message,” Thomas Crow, a professor of modern art at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, wrote in an expert report on behalf of the Warhol Foundation. ![]() Warhol cropped Goldsmith’s photo and made other alterations before creating 12 silkscreen paintings and four other works that would become known as the “Prince Series.” Vanity Fair published one of them with its profile of Prince. The artist to whom Vanity Fair provided the photograph was Warhol, who was not without his own vulnerabilities but was famous for his paintings of Campbell’s soup cans and silkscreens of public figures, including Marilyn Monroe, that were often based on a photograph or newspaper image. In 1984, when Prince shot to stardom with his “Purple Rain” movie and album, Vanity Fair magazine licensed one of Goldsmith’s photos from the 1981 shoot-for $400-to be used as an “artist’s reference” for a portrait it commissioned for a story on the rock star. Her intention was to capture a “vulnerable human being,” she has said. Goldsmith shot him in concert but also in her studio, where she gave him purple eyeshadow and lip gloss to accentuate his sensuality and set the lighting to highlight his chiseled bone structure. In 1981, she approached Newsweek magazine with the idea of photographing Prince, who was just emerging as a rock icon. The story begins with the respondent, Lynn Goldsmith, an accomplished rock photographer who had snapped iconic portraits of musical artists including Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen and Mick Jagger. The case is The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc. “I think this is a potentially significant case for the whole creative realm, not just visual art,” says Roman Martinez, a Latham & Watkins partner who represents the New York City-based foundation charged with preserving the legacy of Warhol, who died in 1987. 12 encompasses the avant-garde pop art of Andy Warhol, the musical genius and personal vulnerability of the performer Prince and the rarefied worlds of rock photography and glossy magazines.Īt stake is nothing less than the future of all “artistic expression,” says one side, while the other says the legal test proposed by its adversary “would transform copyright law into all copying, no right,” and turn the fair use defense under copyright into “a license to steal.” Image from Goldsmith's brief.Ī copyright case going before the U.S. Vanity Fair’s November 1984 issue ran artist Andy Warhol’s illustration of musician Prince with a credit to photographer Lynn Goldsmith.
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