Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-869_87ad.pdf
Page Number: 11

Cite as:  598 U. S. ____ (2023) 

5 

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,2 but it asserts copy- 
right in them.  It has licensed images of the works for com-
mercial 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 in-
formed Condé Nast about the other Prince Series images,
however, Condé Nast obtained a license to publish Orange 
—————— 

2 AWF  sold  12  of  the  works  to  collectors  and  galleries,  and  it  trans-
ferred custody of the remaining four works to the Andy Warhol Museum 
in Pittsburgh.