The Andy Warhol Foundation is asking the Supreme Court to weigh in on a lawsuit over the artist’s Prince Series, produced in 1984.
The lawsuit was filed in 2017 by photographer Lynn Goldsmith, who claims Warhol’s Prince Series was largely based on photographs she took while on assignment for Newsweekmagazine.
Those photos, like Warhol’s paintings, depict the rock star Prince, and were taken just three years before Warhol’s works were completed.
This would be the third round for the Goldsmith vs. Warhol case. In 2019 the Southern District Court of New York ruled in favor of the Warhol Foundation in 2019, but earlier this year the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Goldsmith, saying her work was the “recognizable foundation” for Warhol’s paintings.
The appeals court sent the case back to a lower court, but in a petition filed last Thursday, the Warhol Foundation argues the Supreme Court should hear the case because it “casts a cloud of legal uncertainty over an entire genre of visual art, including canonical works by Andy Warhol and countless other artists.”
The foundation also argues there are much wider issues at stake in this case, and claims the appeals court decision “… will have drastic and harmful consequences for free expression.”
The issues at the heart of the case are also the same as those that face the licensing industry every day. Essentially, the question is about what constitutes fair use of an image or other type of artistic work. For example, if an artist were to create a painting from a single frame of a video, would that artist then have to seek a license from the maker of that video?
In the Warhol case, the question for the Supreme Court may come down to how closely the artworks resemble the photographs. In the written ruling, Judge Gerald Lynch ruled that although Warhol had brightened Goldsmith’s images and changed the perception of depth to be more shallow, he had not done so in a manner that really transformed the work from the earlier photographs.
The Andy Warhol Foundation disputes that view. Lawyer Roman Martinez argues in the Foundation’s petition, “We hope the Court will recognize that Andy Warhol’s transformative works of art are fully protected by law.”