When the Long Museum, the private institution founded by Chinese mega-collectors Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei, began selling work last year, it felt like a sign of the times. It meant that Asian collectors were not only being less active in terms of buying. They were actively selling, too.

Previously, the paintings being sold by collectors like Liu and Wang—a $34.9 million Modigliani that appeared at Sotheby’s last year, for example—came from the West and made their way to China via flashy purchases. Today, it is the opposite: these very same paintings are being sent back to the West, where they will likely find new buyers.

Now, there is news of at least two major paintings on the market that appear to come from China: a Warhol that, according to a source close to the gallery, is priced in excess of $100 million and a Basquiat that sold in 2013 for $29 million.

In mid-May—not coincidentally, during the major auctions in New York—Gagosian opened “Icons From a Half Century of Art,” an exhibition of paintings and sculptures by Basquiat, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, Cy Twombly, and Warhol. It is open only to collectors, and can only be seen by appointment at Gagosian’s 24th Street gallery in New York. The image the gallery used to promote the exhibition on its website is of a Warhol “Mao.” Warhol famously created no fewer than 199 images of “Mao,” but this isn’t just any “Mao.” It is the only one of the four so-called “giant Maos”—they stand a full 15 feet high—that is not in a museum.

The last time the Gagosian “Mao” was publicly on the market was in 2008, when Christie’s, in collaboration with London dealer James Mayor, sent the painting to Hong Kong with a price tag of $120 million. As described in write-up at the time in the Wall Street Journal, that price would have set a record for the artist: the auction record for a Warhol then was the $71.7 million Christie’s got in May 2007 for the 1963 silkscreen Green Car Crash. (The record today is the $195 million that Larry Gagosian paid for a painting of Marilyn Monroe at Christie’s in 2022.) But the “Mao” didn’t sell in 2008 in Hong Kong, and then came the recession. According to a source with close knowledge of the painting, it did, however, sell around 2013 for a price within the range of $120 million.

The person involved in that transaction, dealers say, was Rosaline Wong, who has in the past reportedly worked on behalf of Henry Cheng, chairman of Hong Kong–based New World Development. According to Forbes, Cheng, who succeeded his own father at New World, is China’s third-richest person. New World’s shares dropped 60 percent between January 2023 and January 2024, and the Cheng family’s net worth dropped by nearly a fourth, to $22.1 billion.

Wong is a former Hong Kong barrister that Artnet News and the South China Morning Post previously linked to the purchase of a $150 million Gustav Klimt painting. The painting was previously owned by Oprah Winfrey, and the transaction was brokered by Gagosian, according to Bloomberg. More recently, Artnet News linked Wong with a Klimt that sold at Sotheby’s last year for $108.4 million. Dealers who worked with Wong between 2013 and 2015 say she appeared to be buying on behalf of a foundation that was in formation.

According to South China Morning Post, around 2015, Wong founded an investment advisory company, HomeArt, which matches individuals and companies with art for sale. The SCMP reported in 2022 that at that time Wong was “in the middle of setting up a US$1 billion ‘museum-grade’ art investment fund with Hong Kong- and Singapore-based asset management firm Zheng He Capital, which counts among its heavyweight advisers Gagosian and Wong’s close friend, the Hong Kong billionaire Henry Cheng Kar-shun,” head of New World Development and father of collector Adrian Cheng, executive vice chairman and CEO of New World Development and founder of the K11 , a venture that blends art, commerce, and development, and that has an associated foundation, the K11 Art Foundation. Artnet News reported last year that Wong was “launching a fractional ownership fund specializing in museum-quality works for a broader pool of investors.”

Wong has also been linked to Joseph Lau, whose purchase of a smaller Warhol “Mao” painting in 2006 for $17 million set the stage for Christie’s bringing the “giant Mao” to Hong Kong.

Since 2021, Homeart has since done several exhibitions in collaboration with Christie’s, among them an 11-work Basquiat show in Hong Kong. That exhibition, held in May 2021, included an untitled 1982 painting that was purchased at Christie’s London in 2013 for $29 million. (It’s worth noting that Christie’s made a point of telling the New York Times just after that sale that there was a large amount of bidding from Asia.) That Basquiat painting is also in the current Gagosian “Icons” exhibition, according to several sources who have seen the show.

A representative for Gagosian declined to comment on the identity of the consignor of the Warhol and Basquiat paintings. Wong did not return a request for comment submitted to Homeart.

The four “giant Mao” paintings are so big that Warhol had to make them in the Factory’s screening room rather than the painting studio. They were so expensive to produce that he needed backing from two galleries (Knoedler & Co. and Castelli) and an avid collector of his (Peter Brant). In return, each of those parties got a “giant Mao” painting. The one Christie’s sent to Hong Kong in 2008 went through Castelli to James Mayor, who placed it in a private collection in Europe. Another was sold by Knoedler in 1974 to the Art Institute of Chicago. The third, Brant gifted in 1977 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The fourth “Mao” Warhol kept, and eventually sold it to Charles Saatchi , who eventually sold the piece to the late German collector Erich Marx, who, in 2007, put it on long-term loan to the Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Berlin.

Coincidentally, the Hamburger Bahnhof “Mao” was in the news this week. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ran an op-ed by art historian Von Hubertus Butin, who speculated that the painting might soon hit the market. Marx died in 2020; three paintings from the Marx collection—two Warhols and a Twombly —that previously appeared at the Hamburger Bahnhof have been removed from the museum by his heirs. Butin writes that those paintings, which he claims are collectively worth some $170 million, have been consigned to Gagosian and that some may have sold. (Gagosian declined to comment on this; the museum said only that the paintings have been removed.) The Marx collection’s “Mao” could be next to go, Butin claimed, writing that there had at one point been a $155 million offer made for that “Mao.” The museum said it had no knowledge of this, and dealers told ARTnews that the figure seemed unrealistic. One dealer even called the sum “aspirational,” particularly in the current art market conditions.

As for whether the “Mao” at Gagosian has found a buyer, the gallery isn’t saying. The “Icons” show is up through July 19.

The inaugural outing will be a solo show for New York–based artist Derrick Adams at the APMA Cabinet, a nearly 2,000-square-foot, ground-level project space in the headquarters of Amorepacific, the cosmetics company owned by ARTnews Top 200 Collector Suh Kyung-bae. The exhibition will run September 3 to October 12.

This isn’t the first time Amorepacific has collaborated with a mega-gallery in Seoul. When Pace opened its expanded Seoul location in 2022, in tandem with the first edition of Frieze Seoul, it did so with a teahouse by Osulloc, one of Amorepacific’s subsidiaries.  

Last August, Gagosian hired Jiyoung Lee to lead its operations in South Korea. Lee had previously worked in similar capacities for Western galleries like Sprüth Magers and Esther Schipper.

For the exhibition, titled “The Strip,” Adams will debut new works showing mannequin heads in display windows at beauty shops that are related to his earlier series, “Style Variations,” featuring mannequins with brightly colored wigs set against stark white backgrounds. “I’m always picking subjects that are activated by my interest in drawing in the viewer,” Adams told ARTnews in 2021.

In a statement, Gagosian senior director Nick Simunovic said, “It’s a tremendous honor for Gagosian to be the first gallery to program this extraordinary space at Amorepacific’s headquarters. The venue is an ideal location to celebrate Derrick Adams’s first exhibition in Korea and to share his work with such an important community of art enthusiasts and collectors.”

“Andrew Fabricant and Laura Paulson are no longer with the gallery,” Larry Gagosian said in his email. “At this moment in the gallery’s evolution, we arrived at the point where I decided it was time for us to part ways. We are grateful for their contributions over the past several years and wish them well.”

News of Fabricant and Paulson’s ouster was first reported on Thursday by Bloomberg.

Fabricant first began working with Gagosian in the 1980s. After 15 years there, he left to pursue jobs at other galleries before rejoining Gagosian in 2018. The following year, he was made chief operating officer, overseeing the administrative and operational sides of the business.

In 2022 he joined the flashy board of directors compiled by Gagosian that included members from the real estate, tech, film, and television industries, including Delphine Arnault, executive vice president of Louis Vuitton, who also sits on LVMH’s board of directors and executive committee.

At the time, Larry Gagosian said that his “goal in assembling a Board of Directors was to raise the bar on the gallery’s strategic thinking and vision for the future.” Gagosian, who is now 78, has no known succession plan, and the news spurred some to believe that Fabricant could be an heir to his gallery empire.

This is the second high-profile change at the gallery in the past month. In late May, ARTnews reported that Sotheby’s star specialist Brooke Lampley had left the auction house to join Gagosian in the fall as a senior director.

In an email sent to the gallery’s staff, Gagosian said, “I plan to continue our advisory arm with some changes. I see a lot of potential in the development of that business alongside our core gallery operations and will be sharing more about those plans in the near future.”

Lampley joined Sotheby’s in 2018 after having worked as a specialist at Christie’s where, in 2015, she began leading that house’s Impressionist and Modern Art team in 2012. Over her six years at Sotheby’s Lampley has helped real in marquee worthy consignments and estates, including the Macklowe collection and a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution in 2021 and, much to the chagrin of Christie’s, the Emily Fisher Landau collection in 2023.

When asked about the move Lampley said “after 20 years of auctions, I am excited to experience another side of the art world, and to learn from the very best. My love of art is what drives me, and I am looking forward to getting closer to artists and thinking deeply about the evolution of a body of work.”

Besides overseeing Sotheby’s Contemporary, Modern, Photographs, 20th Century Design, and Prints departments, Lampley was a driving force behind Sotheby’s robust private sales department and invariably has a rolodex full of contacts that will be greatly appreciated and put to good use at Gagosian.

“Brooke is a proven secondary market operator with strong client relationships. She has a drive and entrepreneurial spirit that I think will fit in well at the gallery,” Larry Gagosian told ARTnews.

Lampley is slated to start at Gagosian this fall and will continue to be based in New York.

Sotheby’s CEO Charles Stewart informed the auction house’s staff of Lampley’s planned exit via an email on Wednesday evening, a copy of which was shared with ARTnews. “We are grateful to Brooke for her many contributions to the company over nearly seven years,” the letter read, “…we wish her all the best and look forward to collaborating with her in her next endeavor.”

According to the email, people under Lampley will report to Sebastian Fahey, the global fine art managing director. The Modern & Contemporary Americas team will continue to be led by David Galperin in Contemporary, Courtney Kremers in Private Sales, Julian Dawes in Impressionist and Modern, and Scott Niichel across the middle market Modern and Contemporary categories, the email confirmed.

Cattelan’s bet that art viewers are a bunch of masochists has paid off: the press release claims that he is “the most famous Italian artist since Caravaggio.” I rolled my eyes when reading this at first, before conceding that it’s also probably true. And annoy me as he does, I still eagerly await Cattelan’s next move. I just hope it’s funnier.


Image: View of Maurizio Cattelan’s 2024 exhibition “Sunday” at Gagosian, New York.

Titled “Art for a Safe and Healthy California,” the benefit in Beverly Hills will kick off on April 9, with several works donated by leading artists on view. Hosted by dealer Larry Gagosian, philanthropist and activist Aileen Getty, and Democratic Party mega-donors Susie and Mark Buell, the event will also include a performance by John Legend.

The works will be offered for sale in two ways: during a day sale at Christie’s in May and as part of a selling exhibition at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills location this summer.

Among the artists who have donated works are Ed Ruscha, Christina Quarles, Joey Terrill, Charles Gaines, Karon Davis, Olafur Eliasson, Frank Gehry, Alex Israel, Marilyn Minter, Catherine Opie, Nan Goldin, Mark Grotjahn, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Jackie Amézquita, Hank Willis Thomas, and Jonas Wood, among others.

In a statement, Fonda said, “I am thrilled to be able to use my love of art to propel the fight against climate injustice while simultaneously uplifting the work of these talented and generous artists. I am so fortunate to have Larry Gagosian and his LA team, in addition to the team at Christie’s, by my side as we continue to pursue a safer and healthier California.”

The proceeds raised in both sales will benefit the Campaign for a Safe and Healthy California, which describes itself as “a coalition of public health professionals, environmental justice groups, community and faith leaders, and youth joining together to stand up to Big Oil and make sure that no Californians have to endure health hazards from living just steps from dangerous oil wells,” according to the campaign website.

Darryl Molina Sarmiento, executive director of nonprofit Communities for a Better Environment, which is a member of the Campaign, said in a statement, “Youth and working families in frontline communities across California, have the right to breathe clean air and live in safe neighborhoods free from the constant health harms caused by oil drilling such as respiratory infections, asthma, reduced lung function, and childhood leukemia. We have organized against Big Oil in our neighborhoods and in the Legislature and we are organizing with these incredible artists to defeat them again!”

In September 2022, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law SB1137, which prohibits new oil wells from being drilled within 3,200 feet of homes, schools, day care centers, parks, health care facilities, community resource centers, detention facilities, and certain businesses, as well as mandating that existing wells meet specific health, safety, and environmental requirements by 2025.

Per public policy blog CalMatters, some 2.7 million people in California “live within a few thousand feet of an oil well, public health advocates made their case that buffer zones were in the public interest, and their elected leaders responded,” which led to the passage of SB1137.

Within a few months of SB1137’s passage, a group called Stop the Energy Shutdown, a coalition of oil and gas industry groups, began collecting signatures to repeal the law through a voter referendum, according to the Associated Press. The referendum qualified for the 2024 ballot in early 2023.

In a release for the benefit, the Campaign for a Safe and Healthy California said that the oil industry has spent $53 million to date and is currently spending $500,000 per week to repeal the 2022 law and keep drilling oil in California neighborhoods.  

In a statement, Larry Gagosian said, “Jane has been a great friend for over forty years, and an icon of the American cultural landscape since the 1960s. I have always admired her activism, and when she brought this urgent—David vs. Goliath—cause to my attention, I didn’t hesitate. It’s an honor to partner with her on this crucial issue impacting my home state of California. It’s a must-win in November, and I am incredibly grateful to the generous artists who are helping us ensure a safe and healthy California for generations to come.”

Leading the New York sale on May 14 is the monumental 1982 picture Untitled (ELMAR), a nearly eight-foot-wide canvas featuring a modern-day Icarus about to fall out of the heavens and an archer firing two arrows in his direction. Untitled (ELMAR) is expected to sell for between $40 million and $60 million.

Untitled (ELMAR) was included in an exhibition dedicated to Pellizzi’s collection at the New York’s Hofstra Museum in 1989. It was also on view at an exhibition commemorating the 10-year anniversary of Basquiat’s death at Gagosian Los Angeles in 1998 and featured on the cover of the accompanying catalogue. The picture was also shown at the artist’s retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2018.

In New York, Philips will also sell the 1981 canvas Untitled (Portrait of a Famous Ballplayer). The painting will come with a $6.5 million–$8.5 million estimate. Two weeks later, on May 31, in Hong Kong, the house will sell Native Carrying Some Guns, Bibles, Amorites on Safari (1982) for an estimated $12 million–$18 million. 

Basquiat’s paintings have sold particularly well in Asia. In May 2022, an untitled 1982 painting from Japanese multimillionaire Yusaku Maezawa’s collection sold for $85 million. Just six years earlier, Maezawa had bought it at Christie’s for $57.3 million.

The artist’s work is a staple at New York evening sales. During last year’s May sales, Christie’s sold a 12-foot-wide 1983 triptych from the collection of the Italian fashion designer Valentino Garavani for just over $67 million, putting the painting among the most expensive Basquiat works ever auctioned.

“Basquiat’s relevance and fame has only continued to grow each year and he is one of the most sought-after artists of any century,” Robert Manley, deputy chairman and worldwide co-head 20th century and contemporary art at Philips, said in a statement. He referred to Gagosian’s current exhibition of Basquiat’s work in Los Angeles, and said, “From where I stand, the momentum seems to be picking up.”

This week, the Guardian ran two articles about several Hirst works that were said to have been produced during the 1990s. In fact, the Guardian reported, these works were actually produced more recently, with the Las Vegas work made in 2017, not 1999.

The Las Vegas shark is the fourth of Hirst’s formaldehyde sculptures to reportedly have a nearly 20-year discrepancy in its dating.

That sculpture first appeared in 2018 under the title The Unknown (Explored, Explained, Exploded) when it was installed at the Palms. The hotel and the sculpture were purchased by Frank J. Fertitta III and his brother Lorenzo Fertitta, the resort and casinos scions who made a fortune when they sold their stakes in the Ultimate Fighting Championship in 2017 for $5 billion, 16 years after the brothers bought them for $2 million.

A representative for the Fertittas did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

The works that the Guardian reported had also been misdated are Cain and Abel, Myth Explored, Explained, Exploded, and Dove, which feature two calves, a small shark, and a dove, respectively. They were first shown at Gagosian Hong Kong in the 2017 Hirst solo show “Visual Candy and Natural History,” whose announcement said the works were “from the early to mid-1990s.”

A Gagosian spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a statement to the Guardian, Science Ltd., Hirst’s production company, said, “Formaldehyde works are conceptual artworks, and the date Damien Hirst assigns to them is the date of the conception of the work.”

Hirst’s stance on the dating of conceptual works has been consistent over the years, Science Ltd. said. The artist’s lawyers echoed this, telling the Guardian that “the dating of artworks, and particularly conceptual artworks, is not controlled by any industry standard. Artists are perfectly entitled to be (and often are) inconsistent in their dating of works.”

While it is unclear what effect the Guardian reports will have on Hirst, at least one prominent critic appears to have changed his mind on the artist as a result. In recent essay, Guardian critic Jonathan Jones accused Hirst of distorting his work and his reputation.

“Dry, dusty disputes over whether ready-made objects can be art paled into irrelevance before Hirst’s reminders of our fleshy fragility,” Jones wrote. “Yet now we know Hirst has taken a chainsaw to that glorious past… If you ever saw anything in his art, and I used to see plenty, you can’t help feeling betrayed.”

They surveyed the 30 or so Basquiat art works in relative peace ,before the throng arrived.

Cohen tells me he came straight from writing something “for TV” that might shoot in Los Angeles or in London, he wasn’t sure. Interesting.

There may also be a film. But before anything else he’ll be seen along with Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Lesley Manville and Louis Partridge in Disclaimer, the TV drama thriller Alfonso Cuarón has written and directed for Apple TV+.

Rock and Cohen had skedaddled with pal Guy Oseary to see Madonna by the time Oscar nominee Jeffrey Wright presented himself at the gallery. It was wholly appropriate that the American Fiction star be there. Some 28 years ago, Wright portrayed the artist in Julian Schnabel’s biopic Basquiat. The actor fist-bumped me but wasn’t overly keen on dragging up memories of playing the renowned painter who died in 1988.

I was taken by guests who brought their pooches to the show.

Sylvia Ades over from New York cradled Daisy her maltipoo as she studied Basquiat’s works.

Ades revealed that Basquiat’s Luna Park, 1983, an acrylic and oil stick on canvas, is from her private collection and that she agreed to loan it to the exhibition co-curated by Gagosian and Fred Hoffman, who had been a close friend and collaborator of Basquiat’s.

“I’m getting it back,” Ades joked.

I trooped off to the upper gallery space to study Luna Park and was stunned by it’s coherent ambition and its size. “It’s big, isn’t it ?” Ades agreed.

Another dog lover was Alex Brookhart who was there with Kenny and described as an “LA mutt.”

I was impressed at how well behaved the canines were and felt guilty that my two boys back in the UK don’t get taken to art galleries, but then they have paintings, books and films to enjoy plus they do get walked to exhibitions in green spaces close to our home in east London.

Melanie Griffith and Jane Fonda wandered in and out. Filmmaker Bennett Miller drifted by. He had his own show at the Gagosian in January and has other artworks planned. He tells me that he’s just signed with a writer to collaborate on a movie project that he’ll direct. “It’s early days,” he cautioned.

Rustin executive producer David Permut was in attendance with his fashion executive niece Becca Mines. She’s COO of Rentrayge and was wearing a jacket created by the label.

Permut says he was elated by President Biden’s State of the Union speech. ”It’s what we needed to hear.”

Last week he was at the White House with director George C. Wolfe to screen their film for the First Lady.

My old actor friend Jimmy Jean-Louis was moved by Basquiat’s work. “It gives you a boost to see such magnificence,” he says.

Jean-Louis is headed for a tour of India with the composer A.R. Rahman and a film they both worked on with writer and director Blessy called The Goat Life.

Later some of us scooted over to Steak 48 for dinner. I confess to being addicted to their freshly prepared beignets, which are presented dangling from silver branches. I wanted to resist them but failed, badly.

D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai On ‘Killers of the Flower Moon‘

Reservation Dogs star D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai was telling me at the Green Carpet Fashion Awards the other night the importance of having Lily Gladstone speak “our native language on stage, on television.”

The Canadian-born Oji-Cree spoke passionately about how “our traditional dances, our ceremonies, our religious rites, our women, our regalia and our language were taken away from us,” as he showered the Killers of the Flower Moon Best Actress Oscar nominee with praise.

Indigenous children were put into residential homes in the 19th century “and those homes were kept going for over a hundred years,” where children “were beaten” until they forgot their language, he says.

Ever since Killers of the Flower Moon premiered at Cannes, I’ve read tomes on how North America’s indigenous people had their culture ripped from them so they could be forced to assimilate.

Woon-A-Tai tugged at his hair and explained that kids at those homes had their hair chopped off. ”That’s the reason why native men grow out their hair and keep it long… we believe our hair is our strength and guidance from our ancestors.”

He says Martin Scorsese’s film has been so vital for native Americans because it encourages “the young to learn their language and be fluent in it. Learn your traditional language and heritage,” he implores.

“Killers of the Flower Moon has been this huge moment because native language was spoken not just by Lily Gladstone but by Robert De Niro, that’s huge. The impact the film has had is enormous.”

The actor, who was at the Green Carpet Fashion Awards with his girlfriend Quannah Chasinghorse, the model and actress who served as a co-chair of the event.

He longs for the day when more native writers and directors “will allow me to speak my language” in future projects.

Woon-A-Tai also observed that the performance of the Osage Nation song Wahzhazhe (A Song For My People) at the Oscar ceremony on Sunday is also a significant moment. The song will be performed by members of the Osage tribe.

“It’s going to be a big moment,” says the actor who mingled with other guests at the sustainable 1 Hotel on Sunset Boulevard. They included Zendaya, Annie Lennox, Helen Hunt, Amber Valletta, former president of Ireland Mary Robinson, Trudie Styler and marvellous Livia Firth who founded the GCFA.

Per documents filed yesterday in the Southern District of New York, in the case of Eric Mcnatt v. Richard Prince and Blum & Poe, United States District Judge Sidney H. Stein judge wrote that the defendants are barred from “reproducing, modifying, preparing derivative works from, displaying, selling, offering to sell, or otherwise distributing” the photograph Kim Gordon 1, the Instagram post in which Prince featured Kim Gordon 1, or including the artwork in any book based on the series. Mcnatt, the original photographer, has also been awarded an amount “equal to five times the sales  price” for Prince’s artwork sold by Blum & Poe, plus additional costs “incurred by” Mcnatt “as agreed-upon by the parties.”

In an emailed statement to ARTnews, Prince’s studio manager Matt Gaughan said, “After 8 years of litigation while making 8 figure demands for damages and the additional requirement of Richard admitting infringement [the plaintiffs] approached us on the eve of trial to settle for cents on the dollar and no admission of infringement. We’re very happy with that. This settlement allows Richard and all of the artists to move forward with their practices.”

McNatt brought the suit against Prince in 2020, after discovering Prince’s appropriation of his portrait of Kim Gordon, co-founder of art rock band Sonic Youth. McNatt’s image was commissioned for Paper Magazine in 2014.

Prince titled his artwork Portrait of Kim Gordon, and added the comment “Kool Thang You Make My Heart Sang You Make Everythang Groovy,” a reference to the 1960s song “Wild Thing” and the 1990 Sonic Youth song “Kool Thing,” sung by Gordon. The nearly 5-foot-tall canvas was exhibited at Blum & Poe’s Tokyo Gallery from April 2015 through May of that year. 

Also filed today was a development in Donald Graham v. Richard Prince, Gagosian Inc., and Lawrence Gagosian. The lawsuit concerns the photograph Rastafarian Smoking a Joint, originally taken by Graham and later reproduced by Prince for his first showing of “New Portraits” in an exhibition at Gagosian’s Madison Avenue gallery in 2014. Prince’s artwork, titled Portrait of Rastajay92, was later included in a companion catalog to the exhibition and featured on a billboard promoting “New Portraits” in New York City. Graham filed a cease-and-desist order against Prince, followed by a lawsuit in 2015.

US District Judge Stein wrote that Portrait of Rastajay92 was bound by the same restrictions as Kim Gordon 1: no future reproductions, modifications, distribution, promotions, or sales. Additionally, Graham, like Mcnatt, was awarded expenses amounting to five times its retail price and costs incurred.

Prince and his parties had been attempting for years to have both lawsuits dismissed. In 2017, Stein refused Prince’s appeal, writing in a prior ruling that the “primary image in both works is the photograph itself. Prince has not materially altered the composition, presentation, scale, color palette and media originally used by Graham.” 

Prince, who shot to fame for presenting altered versions of the work of other artists, has argued that his practice is protected by fair use exceptions to federal copyright protections, which allow the limited appropriation of intellectual property for purposes such as scholarship, news reporting, and commentary. 

Asked about the appropriation controversy in 2016, Prince told Vulture: “I’m not going to change, I’m not going to ask for permission, I’m not going to do it.”

In an earlier, unsuccessful lawsuit, French photographer Patrick Cariou accused Prince of copyright infringement after he learned that Prince’s “Canal Zone” series incorporated photographs from Cariou’s 2000 book, Yes, Rasta. Cariou’s case, which bounced between lower and higher courts for years, was eventually determined by whether a “reasonable observer” would find Prince’s use of the source material sufficiently transformative, defined by the court as imbuing a “new expression, meaning, or message.” 

In 2013, New York’s Second Circuit made a landmark ruling that Prince had not exceeded the protection of fair use.

“What is critical is how the work in question appears to the reasonable observer, not simply what an artist might say about a particular piece or body of work,” Judge Barrington Parker wrote for the majority. The precedent set by the case became a touchstone for similar copyright lawsuits brought by artists against powerful industry figures.

In Donald Graham’s original complaint, he accused Prince’ modifications to his photograph of being insufficiently transformative, with only “minor cropping of the bottom and top portions” that left most of the source image “fully in tact,” and “framing the Copyrighted Photograph with elements of the Instagram graphic user interface” such as a line of text Prince wrote that read “richardprince4 Canal Zinian da lam jam”.

Blum & Poe and Gagosian did not immediately respond to an ARTnews request for comment. 

[Update 1/29/2024: The article was updated to reflect that the court’s “final judgement” included agreed upon terms, and was not a ruling.]