Artistic License

At the February Ambiente show in Frankfurt, Germany, Rosenthal Studio-Line debuted a collection of Andy Warhol designs featured on a full line of tableware and porcelain. This introduction followed fast on the heels of the Spring Fair Birmingham launch of Andy Warhol Stationery, a complete range of photo albums, giftwrap, gift bags, letterhead, and party invitations featuring original Warhol Pop designs from the '50s and '60s.

Warhol's art seems to be tailor-made for licensing. His images of Campbell's soup cans, Marilyn Monroe, daisies in psychedelic colors, and others have a distinct commercial appeal. But he is just one of a long list of master artists — from Caravaggio to Calder, Vermeer to Van Gogh — whose images have appeared in recent years on everything from sweatshirts to mouse pads.

The works of an artist who is still living or has been dead less than 75 years (such as Warhol) are generally owned by the artist's estate, his heirs, or a museum or other institution, and are protected by copyright. On the other hand, the works of an artist who has been dead for 75 years or more usually fall into the realm of public domain, making them available to all, for practically any purpose.

There are many considerations a licensor and licensee must deal with when using the work of fine artists. Relevant factors range from the demands of estate representatives and museums to the market forces that drive interest in a particular product.

While some agencies actively seek to develop licenses for the works of Old Masters and contemporary masters, others prefer to steer clear of big name artists, choosing instead to nurture practicing artists whose works may never hang on a museum's walls, but can be licensed directly for commercial purposes. We recently spoke with three licensing companies, each of which works with artists in its own way, to get their views on licensing fine art to the gift and decorative accessories industry.

Marilyn Goldberg, founder and president of Museum Masters International (MMI), has been navigating the art licensing industry for more than 20 years. When she founded MMI in 1980, museum gift stores were limited to selling posters and books, but Goldberg soon pioneered the business of adapting fine art images to ancillary product lines. These days, MMI is a division of Art Merchandising & Media AG (AMM), Munich, Germany, and is the official licensee of the Pablo Picasso estate for tabletop, glassware, and other home decor products.

AMM specializes in creating ancillary product lines from copyrighted works of art. To do this, the company's designers take a specific detail from an image, and redesign it to create a marketable "fashion concept." However, when an image is in the public domain, it can be very difficult for a designer to protect its product.

"When you do it properly, working with public domain art can be much more expensive than working with a bona fide secured estate, because there are just so many steps to cover if you want to protect the product," says Goldberg. "For instance, when we came up with the idea of doing a ceramic collection, we registered Monet, Degas, Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and several others. We used a detail [from their works] and designed a new border [for plates]. We spent the money to make the designs and the samples, and to register the class. That art is in the public domain, and we derived it in such a way so that the design becomes our copyright, with our trademark.

"If we were just going to make one pretty little candy dish, we might not want to spend the money trademarking it around the world," notes Goldberg. "However, if we are planning a whole line of ceramics, vases, tableware, and glassware, then we're protecting ourselves, our manufacturer, and our distributing clients by spending the money on the trademark and copyright for all of our different designs."

"Most of the art licensing in America is not art that is sitting in a museum somewhere," says Lance Klass, president of Porterfield's Art Licensing in Concord, New Hampshire. "And the majority of the art that sells well in galleries just doesn't translate to products."

Porterfield's, which licenses artwork into the home decor, stationery, home textile, and giftware markets, currently handles 35 active fine artists as well as one property (from the Philadelphia Museum of Art) that is in the public domain. "I've definitely found my greatest success working with living artists," says Klass.

Porterfield's works with contemporary commercial fine artists with whom they can develop a whole range of licenses across product categories. This includes not only adapting existing fine art to suit licensed product, but in many cases involves hands-on design of the application of the art.

"Take Diane Knott," says Klass, referring to one of his artists. "When one of her licensees needs work done on one of Diane's images to fit a product, she is available to help adapt the design from the original artwork. Andy Warhol can't do that for you."

Another agency that prefers to work with contemporary artists over artists in the public domain is AppleJack Licensing International of Manchester Center, Vermont. Founded in 1989 as a publisher of limited-edition fine art prints, AppleJack was forced to diversify its business in the mid-'90s, when the limited-edition business began to fade.

"Publishers were publishing way too much," says Paul Wheeler, the company's director. "Eventually, the market just got too congested."

Around 1995, manufacturers started asking to use the company's prints on greeting cards and jigsaw puzzles. AppleJack began by licensing its art across traditional, two-dimensional product categories such as stationery, puzzles, and wall decor: markets for which the original images did not have to be manipulated.

As the market became more sophisticated, AppleJack decided to aggressively court manufacturers from a wider range of categories. To appeal to that broader base, they brought in decorative, folk, and contemporary artists who could design product-specific images that would translate immediately to three-dimensional product

Today, the company employs a two-tier strategy for matching artists with manufacturers. The first tier — an off-the-rack option — lets manufacturers that know who and what they are looking for, search the company's 35,000-image archive for a match. The other tier involves building full-scale licensing programs around a stable of 15 "premium" artists, creating a brand name that stretches across categories including tabletop, home furnishings, giftware, textiles, and stationery.

This two-tiered strategy benefits not only the artists that AppleJack represents, but also gives manufacturers ongoing access to a steady stream of new art.

"As the market continues to get more sophisticated, people's tastes are changing and improving," notes Wheeler. "A lot of manufacturers now prefer to license fine art because it's a little more distinctive than the big media properties that you see everywhere."

Whether licensing companies choose to do business with estates and museum-quality artists or through the signing of agreements with commercial artists, art licensing is becoming an even greater part of the gift and decorative accessories industry.

And no doubt, Andy Warhol would approve.