The 97th Oscar awards were presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on 2 March 2025 in Los Angeles, honouring movies released in 2024. Nominated in eight Oscar categories, A Complete Unknown is a biographical musical drama directed by James Mangold, who co-wrote the screenplay loosely based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! The film chronicles an unknown 19-year-old Bob Dylan’s 1961 arrival on the acoustic folk music scene in New York City, and his meteoric rise climaxing in a controversial groundbreaking performance using electric instruments in 1965.
Three days before the Oscars ceremony in Hollywood, the Gagosian Gallery in nearby Beverly Hills held an evening reception to open an exhibition of artwork by Richard Prince, Bob Dylan, featuring ‘a trio of large-scale paintings of the singer-songwriter … which together make up Untitled (Dylan) (2014)’. Each 10ft-square canvas uses photographer Jerry Schatzberg’s January 1966 12”x12” close-up portrait shot of Dylan, which was reproduced on the front cover of Dylan’s seminal double LP Blonde on Blonde released in June that year. The shot is in colour, with a slightly shaky focus, and shows Dylan in front of a brick building, wearing a dark brown suede jacket and a black-and-white chequered scarf, looking directly at the photographer.
According to Gagosian, Prince’s version of Schatzberg’s image is reproduced ‘in gauzy black-and-white … manipulates its already shaky focus to varying degrees, further obscuring its fine detail … [which] exemplifies the process of rephotography that Prince began using in 1977 to appropriate shots from the commercial realm.’ Moreover, ‘Prince builds on the slight blurriness of Schatzberg’s shot – reportedly a consequence of shivering brought on by freezing New York weather – by making each inkjet-printed canvas a bit fuzzier than the one that precedes it.’
Plagiarising works of other artists – even unconsciously – is a perennial possibility for all artists, most of whom use their best original creative skills to avoid such situations. Some artists, however, consciously appropriate an entire work of another artist into their own creation. Such borrowings are designed to be self-evident (even though there may be changes of scale or medium or colour, as with Prince’s three Dylan canvases) and are intended to engage the spectator in intellectual consideration of the original work in its new context.
A frequent query, especially by artist-spectators of appropriated works, is whether they violate any copyrights and moral rights in the annexed works: a good question, a good initial answer to which is perhaps nobody knows – without undertaking meaningful research into many and various possibilities.
Appropriated work may be in the so-called ‘public domain’ and may be freely reproduced, because artists’ intellectual property rights last only for their lifetime plus decades after death. The length of post mortem copyright varies worldwide, and is generally determined by an artist’s nationality, for example: in Canada, China, Belarus, most of the Middle East and Africa, and New Zealand, such rights last for 50 years after the year of an artist’s death; in Australia, the EU, Georgia, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Russia, Turkey, the UK, Ukraine, and the US, for 70 years; and in Mexico for 100 years post mortem.
Although there is readily ascertainable public information, most people are unlikely to know offhand that, for example: Henri Matisse’s copyright expired on 31 December 2024, 70 years after his death in 1954; Jackson Pollock’s expires on the last day of 2026, Marcel Duchamp’s runs until 2038, Pablo Picasso’s to 2043, Andy Warhol’s to 2057 and Richard Hamilton’s to 2081. Frida Kahlo died in 1954 and Diego Rivera in 1957, and their copyrights expire in Mexico on the last day of 2054 and 2057 respectively.
Schatzberg currently lives in the US, and owns intellectual property rights in his Dylan image. In 1966, he evidently granted Columbia Records a copyright licence to reproduce the image on the cover of its release of Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. It is not generally known whether Schatzberg gave Prince a copyright licence to reproduce and manipulate his image to create the trio of Untitled (Dylan) canvases in 2014. Such lack of general knowledge is exemplified in relation to Warhol’s ‘icon series’ of portraits of celebrities and cultural figures, from the early 1960s to the 1980s. In most cases, especially in the early years when he was a relatively unknown fine artist, Warhol used lessons learned from his former career in the commercial design industry to secure copyright licences for his reproduction and manipulation of photographs for which he did not own copyright. It is little-known that such screen-printed works, on paper and canvas, usually carry two copyrights today: in the original photographer’s image, and in his own so-called ’warholisation’ superimpositions.
Furthermore, it is not widely known that Warhol was sued in the 1960s for his unauthorized use and copyright infringement of their shots by photographers Patricia Caulfield (‘Flowers’ series), Henri Dauman (‘Jackie Kennedy’ series), and Charles Moore (‘Race Riot’ series). Each claimed Warhol appropriated their photographs without permission and without paying an appropriate copyright licence fee. Warhol settled some of these claims by payment out of court, or paid court-ordered damages; and by all accounts was chastened by these claims, thereafter only using celebrity shots taken by him.
Schatzberg is not known to have sued Prince for unlicensed use of his Dylan shot, and the absence of such a suit prompts speculation: that Schatzberg has not been sufficiently aggrieved and motivated to take legal action, and/or that he has acquiesced in Prince’s appropriation.
Acquiescence by artists in unlicensed appropriation of their copyright works occurs more commonly than is generally known – and fuels a widespread misconception among artists that appropriation is permitted by copyright law: not quite so. Copyright courts worldwide usually have wide judicial discretion – exercisable on a case-by-case basis – to deny a copyright violation claimant who has waited too long to file suit, often on the legal basis that such a delay amounts to a claimant’s tacit consent to the unlicensed use.
Copyright owners’ unspoken or implied complaisance occurs for many and various reasons, and is perhaps best illustrated by Warhol’s depiction of Campbell’s Soup Cans in his 32 paintings from 1962. The Campbell Soup Company initially sued Warhol for copying their can label design without permission, which Warhol defended (on the ground of ‘fair use’), yet the company soon realised that widespread media controversy surrounding the suit was attracting negative publicity to the soup-maker’s brand and therefore withdrew the claim. Instead, the company decided to embrace Warhol’s artworks that had – albeit unwittingly – advanced its brand recognition, its boss even sending Warhol packs of soup with a thank-you note saying ‘I have since learned that you like Tomato Soup, so I am taking the liberty of having a couple of cases of our Tomato Soup delivered to you’.
Doubtless, there was similar thinking in the tacit acceptance by fashion and celebrity portrait photographer Mario Testino when his famous shot of 1990s supermodel Kate Moss was appropriated by Banksy in his ‘warholised’ 2003/05 print series. Executing a double appropriation, Banksy took the hair from Warhol’s 1962 Marilyn Monroe silkscreen paintings and superimposed it onto Testino’s Moss portrait – thereby portraying Moss and Monroe as corresponding icons of their respective eras.
Prince evidently flirted with acquiescence early in his career. In the 1980s Prince began his ‘Cowboys’ series in which he rephotographed Marlboro cigarette ads, featuring cowboys riding through open ranges of the Wild Wild West: he excised all text from an advert, enlarged the image, and framed it as a new work of fine art. According to Prince, ‘I started taking pictures of the cowboys. You don’t see them out in public anymore – you can’t ride down a highway and see them on a billboard. But at Time Life, I was working with seven or eight magazines [clipping articles from magazines for staff writers], and Marlboro had ads in almost all of them. Every week, I’d see one and be like, “Oh, that’s mine. Thank you.” It’s sort of like beachcombing.’
Philip Morris tobacco company commissioned the advertising company Leo Burnett Worldwide to originate and develop the Marlboro campaign from 1954 to 1999, and they were almost certainly copyright owners of the images Prince appropriated. It is not known whether a copyright lawsuit against Prince has ever been considered or filed by them, especially since he has continued to make versions of his cowboy works to date.
Some photographers of the original Marlboro Man shots (who are probably not their copyright owners) continue to voice grievances about the rise in cultural and market values of Prince’s versions of them, chiefly because they have never been publicly credited as originators. For example, in 2000, one of two editions of Prince’s Untitled (Cowboy), (1989), was acquired by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which has chosen not to name the original photographer as first author in its collection catalogue entry. In 2005, art market sale values of Prince’s cowboy artworks reached a peak, when the other edition of Prince’s Untitled (Cowboy), (1989), sold at Christie’s New York for a record $1,248,000 – making it the then most expensive photographic print ever purchased at public auction.
Those first photographers are especially bitter about Prince’s continually unabashed comments about his appropriation practice. ‘Sometimes when I walk into a gallery and I see someone’s work,’ Prince said in a 2012 Interview magazine profile, ‘I think to myself, “Gee, I wish I had done that”.’ Prince’s website currently quotes further brazen comments from the artist: ‘The pictures I went after – stole – were too good to be true. They were about wishful thinking, public pictures that happen to appear in the advertising sections of mass-market magazines, pictures not associated with an author…It was their look I was interested in. I wanted to re-present the closest thing to the real thing.’ To the general public, those photographer-originators were evidently theft victims, and remain completely unknown.
© Henry Lydiate 2025