Opinion of the Court
Figure 2. A purple silkscreen portrait of Prince created in 1984 by Andy Warhol to illustrate an article in Vanity Fair.
pencil drawings. The works are collectively referred to as the “Prince Series.” See Appendix, infra. Goldsmith did not know about the Prince Series until 2016, when she saw the image of an orange silkscreen portrait of Prince (“Orange Prince”) on the cover of a magazine published by Vanity Fair’s parent company, Condé Nast. See fig. 3, infra.
By that time, Warhol had died, and the Prince Series had passed to the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. AWF no longer possesses the works,[1] but it asserts copyright in them. It has licensed images of the works for commercial and editorial uses. In particular, after Prince died in 2016, Condé Nast contacted AWF about the possibility of reusing the 1984 Vanity Fair image for a special edition magazine that would commemorate Prince. Once AWF informed Condé Nast about the other Prince Series images, however, Condé Nast obtained a license to publish Orange
- ↑ AWF sold 12 of the works to collectors and galleries, and it transferred custody of the remaining four works to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
