È legale appendere un falso Van Gogh sopra il proprio divano?

I almost bought a "hand-painted Van Gogh" off a folding table on a sidewalk in a city I won't name, from a guy who swore up and down it was oil — real oil, brush and everything — forty dollars.

And I stood there doing the maths on whether forty dollars was a steal or an insult, and it never once occurred to me to ask whether I was allowed to own it.

Not whether it was good. I could see it wasn't. The yellow was wrong, too clean, no drag in the brush. But whether the whole transaction was legal? It felt like buying a shirt. It felt like the most obviously fine thing in the world.

Here's the part that actually surprised me once I went and checked: for that particular painting, it was fine. Van Gogh has been dead since 1890. Nobody owns The Starry Night the way somebody owns a Marvel character. You can paint it, print it, tattoo it on your shin, sell all three, and the only thing stopping you is taste.

But swap the guy's cardboard sign from VAN GOGH to WARHOL, and the same forty-dollar transaction turns into something a lawyer would very much like to talk to both of us about.

The painting doesn't look any different. That's the whole confusing, unfair, completely arbitrary heart of this article.

The Wall You Keep Hitting Isn't Talent. It's a Clock.

Here's what nobody tells you at the folding table: whether a copy is legal has nothing to do with how good it is, how famous the painting is, or how much you're willing to pay.

It comes down to one number — how long ago the artist died — run through one rule.

In the EU and the UK, copyright lasts the artist's life plus seventy years. On the first of January after that seventieth anniversary, the gate swings open and the painting becomes everyone's. Forever. Free. No asking.

Rembrandt's free. Vermeer's free. Van Gogh is so free it's almost funny.

Picasso is not. He died in 1973, so nobody gets to sell you a legal print of Guernica until 2044. Dalí is locked until 2060. Warhol until 2058.

It's not a review. It's a calendar with teeth.

What "Copying" Even Means When the Artist's Medium Is a Machine That Copies

Stand in front of Warhol's Marilyn Diptych at Tate Modern and you're looking at the single best argument ever made for why "I made it myself" isn't a legal defence.

Fifty identical faces, twenty-five per panel — and the word "identical" is doing real work there. This isn't fifty paintings of Marilyn Monroe. It's one photograph pushed through a silkscreen fifty times, ink forced through mesh with a squeegee, dragged in one pass, thick and fast, no going back to fix a mistake because there is no going back.

On the left panel the colour is turned all the way up — hot pink skin, acid turquoise eyeshadow, egg-yolk yellow hair, lips the red of a stop sign. Garish on purpose. A screen test slide left in the projector too long.

And down each row you can watch the machine start to fail. The pink drifts half a millimetre off the black key line. An eye socket blurs where the squeegee skidded. The ink pools thick in one corner of a mouth and starves to nothing in the next, so that by the time you reach the right panel the whole thing has gone grey and ghostly, faces bleeding into each other like a photograph left too long in the developer tray.

That drift, that failure — that isn't sloppiness. That's the entire point, rendered in ink.

Warhol didn't paint Marilyn Monroe fifty times because he loved her fifty different ways. He ran a photograph of her through an industrial process because that is what had already happened to her, to her face, to her name, a hundred thousand times over, by magazines and studios and men who never once asked permission. He wanted you to feel the machine doing it to you too.

It is a painting about being copied, made entirely out of copying.

And it is still, right now, this minute, completely illegal for a stranger to reproduce and sell. I don't know whether that's poetry or a punchline. Possibly both.

The Law Finally Caught Up, and It Landed on the Side You Didn't Expect

In May 2023 the US Supreme Court ruled on exactly this problem, and the case reads like it was written to be an example in an article like this one.

Photographer Lynn Goldsmith shot Prince in 1984 for a one-time magazine licence. Four hundred dollars. Done.

Warhol took that photograph and silkscreened it — same trick as Marilyn — into a series called the Prince series. Fine, everybody agreed, transformative enough, nobody sued.

Then in 2016 the Warhol Foundation licensed one of those silkscreens, Orange Prince, to a magazine for ten thousand dollars. Goldsmith got zero of it.

She sued. The Court sided with her, 7 to 2, on a test narrower and meaner than most artists want to hear: it doesn't matter how transformed the image looks if the new use serves the same purpose as the old one.

Both images illustrated a magazine story about Prince. Same job, same market — and that similarity beat every argument about how different the two pictures looked on the page.

Kagan dissented, and warned it would choke off exactly the kind of appropriation art Warhol built a career on. Maybe. But the ruling is the ruling, and it means "I changed it enough" is a much weaker shield than it used to be.

Two Locks, Two Different Keys

Here's the thing that took me longest to understand, and it is the single most practically useful idea in this article.

It isn't just the painting that can be locked up. Sometimes it's the photograph of the painting — a completely separate right, expiring on its own clock.

For thirty years, the Reina Sofía in Madrid banned photography of Guernica outright, only lifting it in September 2023. Picasso's estate still administers reproduction rights in Spain through a collecting society called VEGAP — so even though the painting hangs in a public museum, printing it on a mug without a licence is a phone call you do not want to get.

Good news on the flip side, though, and it's genuinely good.

A 1999 US case called Bridgeman v. Corel ruled that a straight, faithful photograph of a public-domain painting — no creative choices, just documentation — doesn't earn its own separate copyright. Because copying something exactly isn't creativity. It's a photocopier with better lighting. The EU passed the same rule into law in 2019.

So a museum can gatekeep its own photography contractually, sure. But a flat, honest reproduction of something like the Mona Lisa cannot be re-copyrighted just because someone photographed it well.

Two locks, two different keys — and almost nobody selling you a print bothers to tell you which one they've actually cleared.

The Verdict, in Two Tables, No Hedging

Who's free right now, and who isn't

Look at the last column and then look at the third one. The two most-wanted artists on the entire market are both locked. That is not an accident. That is the market's single largest unmet appetite, sitting behind a date.

Six ways people "copy" a painting, and what happens to each one

How to Tell Whether a Seller Has Actually Cleared It

Theory is lovely. Here is the practical test, which is simply: look at what a vendor is willing to make you. A catalogue is a legal disclosure wearing a shopping cart.

Read that table across and you will notice something reassuring: every serious vendor in this business quietly obeys the clock. Nobody with a real address and a returns policy is selling you a Dalí. The forty-dollar folding table is not competing with these people. It is competing with nobody, because it is not really a business — it is a man with a van and an optimistic view of enforcement.

And note the phrasing in the bottom row one more time. A museum that owns the actual paintings tells you, in writing, that some works are restricted from reproduction. If the institution with the strongest possible claim still says no, a stranger on a sidewalk saying yes is not offering you a bargain. He is offering you his risk.

Three Questions You're Probably Asking Yourself

So is it actually legal to buy a reproduction of my favourite painting?

Depends entirely on whether the artist has been dead seventy years. Van Gogh, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Klimt — dead long enough, buy freely, paint it on your garage door if you want. Picasso, Dalí, Warhol, Magritte — still locked, and a seller offering you a cheap "reproduction" of any of those four is either licensed, which is rare and they'd be advertising it in 40-point type, or breaking the law and hoping you won't ask.

If the painting's public domain, is the photo I found of it online free too?

Usually, if it's a faithful, flat reproduction — a straight photo of a public-domain painting doesn't earn its own new copyright in the US or the EU. That's Bridgeman v. Corel and Article 14 of the EU copyright directive, both settled law. But museums sometimes still slap restrictions on their own photography by contract, which is a different fight than copyright. Use an open-access programme — the Art Institute of Chicago alone released over fifty thousand images for free, no strings — and skip the argument entirely.

Did the Warhol Supreme Court case basically outlaw collage and appropriation art?

No, but it took the floor out from under the easy defence. It's not enough anymore to say the new work looks different or means something different — the test is whether it serves the same purpose in the same market as the thing you copied. Warhol's Orange Prince illustrated a magazine story about Prince, same as Goldsmith's photo did. Same job. That's what lost the case, not the amount of visual change.

The Verdict

Buy the dead ones. Buy them proudly, buy them big, and don't let anybody make you feel cheap about it — you are participating in a tradition that started in Leonardo's own studio and has never once stopped.

And when you find yourself wanting the locked ones, notice what you're actually feeling. Not thwarted taste. A date on a calendar, set by a parliament, that has nothing to do with the painting and everything to do with a man's lungs giving out in a particular year.

Dalí until 2060. I'll be dead. You might not be. Hang something for me.

Further Reading

• The Starry Night — the most freely copyable famous painting on earth, and the most copied.
• Marilyn Diptych — the catalogue entry for the painting this article is partly about.
• Mastering Art Collecting: Acquiring Museum-Quality Famous Reproductions — collecting inside the clock.
• Ten Iconic Pop Art Masterpieces That Changed Art History — the most legally complicated movement in this article.

Sources

• In the Courts: The US Supreme Court's Warhol decision — WIPO Magazine
• Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, 598 U.S. 508 (2023) — Justia
• Opinion of the Court, No. 21-869 (PDF) — Supreme Court of the United States
• Supreme Court sides against Andy Warhol Foundation — NPR
• Bridgeman Art Library, Ltd. v. Corel Corp., 36 F. Supp. 2d 191 (S.D.N.Y. 1999) — Justia
• Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. — Wikipedia
• Article 14, or when the Public Domain Enters the New Copyright Directive — Kluwer Copyright Blog
• Article 14 and the public domain — the state of play across Europe — Europeana Pro
• Photo ban lifted on Picasso's Guernica after 30 years — The Art Newspaper
• Reina Sofía Museum Lifts 30-Year Photo Ban on Picasso's Guernica — ARTnews
• Public Domain Day 2026 — Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain
• Lifecycle of Copyright: 1930 Works in the Public Domain — US Copyright Office
• Open Access — The Art Institute of Chicago
• Reproduction Gallery, TOPofART, Fabulous Masterpieces and MFA Images archival replicas — vendor catalogues and claims as published, August 2026.
• Per-artist demand ranks aggregated from reproduction and digital-image orders across TopImpressionists.com, AllPaintingsStore.com and WikiOO.org, retrieved 8 August 2026.

This is not legal advice, and terms vary by country. US works from before 1978 turn on registration and renewal rather than the artist's death, and other jurisdictions run life-plus-fifty or life-plus-one-hundred. Check your own. But the shape of the answer doesn't change: it was never about how good the fake is.