When It Comes to Licensing, Some Artists Cash in While Others Push Back

Can you tell the time on that Swatch watch, or does the look of splattered paint on the dial and wristband make the time hard to see—or perhaps irrelevant? Swatch, which for 40 years has produced limited-edition lines of watches with designs by such artists as Keith Haring, Nam June Paik, Sam Francis, Yoko Ono, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Piet Mondrian, Roy Lichtenstein and quite a few others, has recently released two new ones: a Jackson Pollock featuring his 1947 painting Alchemy and a Paul Klee edition with a portion of his 1919 The Bavarian Don Giovanni. (Both works are part of the permanent collection of the Guggenheim.) As wristwatches go, the Pollock ($115) and Klee ($105) are priced between a Timex and a Citizen—expensive for your 12-year-old’s first timepiece but the right sort of novelty gift for an art-enthusiast boyfriend on your second anniversary.

Perhaps the greatest novelty of all is finding so many mostly well-known images by mostly well-known artists on a growing number of products. Swatch has worked with several museums in the U.S. and Europe, according to Carlo Giordanetti, a member of the Swatch Design Committee and chief executive officer of the Swatch Art Palace in Shanghai. These include the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Centre Pompidou and the Louvre in Paris, Tate and Tate Modern in the U.K. as well as MoMA and the Guggenheim in New York City. Additionally, he told Observer, “Swatch Art Journey Collections are also sold in the museum shops of the institutions involved in each collaboration.” He added that the brand has also licensed images from living artists such as Kenny Scharf and Joana Vasconcelos.

Swatch isn’t the only company producing wristwatches with notable art images on their dials. Musart has its own collection, with licensed designs by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian and Andy Warhol. Another company, WatchCraft, has artistic images on a series of its watches, although none of them appear to be based on artwork by well-known artists, including its Gaudi Three-Tone-Wide, which is unrelated to the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí.

Licensing of art images for one product or another has been on an upward trajectory for years, and it is difficult to find a big-name artist of the present or past who has not been swept up in it. In recent weeks, the Amsterdam-based clothing brand Scotch & Soda released a collection of apparel items said to be “inspired” by the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat, including a striped long-sleeve t-shirt priced at roughly the same as the Pollock Swatch. A few years back, the Metropolitan Museum of Art partnered with PacSun in a deal that, according to Martin Cribbs, vice president of brand management at the brand extension licensing firm Beanstalk, “blew the doors open” to Millennial and Gen Z audiences.

A study conducted in 2024 by Licensing International, a New York City-based trade organization for the global licensing industry, found that global retail sales of licensed merchandise for art properties reached $2.47 billion in 2017, increasing to $3.95 billion in 2024. Its members licensed $3.69 billion for merchandise and services worldwide in 2024. Art properties are defined as everything from individual artists supporting their artistic endeavors via licensing to businesses and organizations that create or own art and design specifically used to decorate a range of products, including prints, NFTs, home décor, housewares, textiles, publishing, giftware and apparel. According to a spokesperson for Licensing International, “nonprofit licensing still has a low share of the market at less than one percent but appears to be a high potential segment moving forward,” adding that nonprofits increased their licensing by 16.8 percent in 2024 and 2023 itself saw growth of 19.4 percent.

The Artists Rights Society, which represents more than 100,000 living artists and artists’ estates in negotiating licensing agreements with manufacturers of all types, has also seen “an increased interest in art licensing,” according to Andrea Fisher-Scherer, director of merchandise licensing. “We receive more and more requests for licensing art images,” many of those inquiries coming at the annual Licensing Expo, which takes place in May in Las Vegas.

Among the licensing deals that the Artists Rights Society has arranged are with clothing designer Ulla Johnson for patterns based on images by painters Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler, Shinola watches that borrow from the palette of painter Georgia O’Keeffe, a Louise Bourgeois collection for Mene jewelry, Orlebar Brown swimsuits using imagery from painters David Salle and Stuart Davis, Herschel Supply backpacks with designs by painter Miriam Schapiro and New York’s Museum of Modern Art for its Matisse slippers. “Licensing revenues are significant for artists’ estates and foundations,” Fisher-Scherer said. “Particularly for the foundations that give grants, licensing helps them generate money.”

Although the estate of Roy Lichtenstein is not a member of the Artists Rights Society, Frank Avila-Goldman, executive director of arts and intellectual property for the estate, said that the estate licenses images by the artist for a variety of products, including “Uniqlo, PUMA/BMW, Skateroom, Supply Stickers, Commes des Garçons/Junya Watanabe and U.S. Postal Service stamps, as well as various movies/streaming services/TV licensing.” The revenues earned from these licenses are generated “in the interest of supporting museum and cultural institutions.”

Licensing arrangements are individually negotiated, but Ilana Wilensky, president of Jewel, a global licensing company whose clients include the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, New York Botanical Garden, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Natural History Museum, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum as well as contemporary artists around the world, says they “most typically run for two to three years. During that time, the artist or museum receives a royalty on each product sold. They also retain approval rights over how their brand and images are used, ensuring the final products align with their standards and identity.” She added that there are benefits for the licensee and the buyer, as “licensing can help cultural institutions extend their archives beyond the walls of the museum and reach entirely new audiences,” while for many buyers “owning an original work of art isn’t possible, but wearing a dress inspired by an artist or having a pillow featuring a work from a museum collection allows them to express that love of art in a personal, accessible way.”

Perhaps the single largest licensee is the Norman Rockwell Licensing Company, based in Niles, Illinois, which licenses images by the artist (1894-1978) for use on hundreds of products every year, including jigsaw puzzles, coffee mugs, fabrics, date books, paper plates, scented candle boxes, wine bottle labels, Christmas ornaments and bedspreads and sheets.

Not every artist’s estate or foundation welcomes the opportunity to license images for products. Adolph “Gottlieb’s position was that the manufacture and sale of reproductions reduces interest in (or creates a reduced desire to experience) the original,” said Sanford Hirsch, executive director of the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. In 2023, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, which opposes the use of Mitchell imagery for commercial purposes, sent a cease-and-desist letter to French luxury brand Louis Vuitton after it featured the artist’s paintings in the background of advertisements for the brand’s Capucines handbags. Fisher-Scherer noted that the Mark Rothko estate “generally doesn’t care for the artist’s images used on three-dimensional products,” since that entails a “manipulation of the artwork to fit the products,” but there are skateboards, hats, clothing and shoes with Rothko imagery on them.

A great-niece of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo brought a lawsuit against a Panamanian-based licensing agency that represented the artist’s heirs for permitting the artist’s name and image to be used on alcoholic drinks, dolls and other products. The principal offending product was a Mattel-produced Frida Kahlo doll as part of its “Inspiring Women” series. “It should have been a much more Mexican doll,” the great-niece said, “dressed in more Mexican clothing, with Mexican jewelry.”

“Licensing revenue can indeed be an important resource for grantmaking programs, including those of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, as well as the Keith Haring Foundation,” said Christine J. Vincent, managing director of The Aspen Institute’s Artist-Endowed Foundations Initiative. “The artists associated with both of these foundations embraced a robust involvement with the marketplace as a dimension of their art practice during their lifetimes.” Noting that some artists’ foundations avoid licensing images for souvenir items such as refrigerator magnets and coffee mugs, she said that “a number of artist-endowed foundations license the manufacture of objects created by their artists as artistic endeavors and licensed by the artists themselves during their lifetimes, including the Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and Judd Foundation. In each of these cases, product licensing plays an important role to increase the public’s awareness and understanding of the artist’s creative works and principles, even as it may also generate revenue used to support the Foundations’ charitable programs.”

Jeff Koons, Vik Muniz, Julian Schnabel and Kara Walker have all licensed images to the giftware company Bernardaud, while Samsung has a line of “Frame” televisions that, when the set is off, display a work of art on the screen; among the artists represented are Salvador Dalí, René Magritte and Jackson Pollock. A separate arrangement between automobile manufacturer BMW and living artists has produced 20 “art cars” decorated with designs by a range of artists, including David Hockney, Jenny Holzer, Julie Mehretu, A.R. Penck and Andy Warhol. The first car in the series, a 3.0 CSL, was created in 1975 with designs by Alexander Calder and the most recent was in 2024, the BMW M Hybrid V8 with imagery by Julie Mehretu. These automobiles are not produced in quantity but are singular vehicles used primarily in the annual 24-hour race at Le Mans, France. After the race, the cars become museum pieces for BMW.

“The idea for the BMW Art Cars was born at the racetrack back in 1975, when drivers and management thought it would look amazing if an artist such as Alexander Calder could design a car,” Thomas Girst, global head of cultural engagement for the BMW Group, told Observer. The artist was contacted and provided a maquette—a small-scale version of a larger sculptural design—for the car that entered the race. Most of the other artists in the series, who are selected by a jury of international museum curators and directors, travel to Germany to paint directly onto the cars or oversee the application of their designs. “In 2010 Jeff Koons spent weeks with our designers and engineers. In 1979, Warhol flew over from NYC with his entourage and painted his M1 race car in just 28 minutes.” Julie Mehretu, on the other hand, “created the African Film and Media Arts Collective as part of her work on the art car.”

They are still race cars, he noted, and artists cannot do anything that adds weight to the vehicles or affects aerodynamics and their ability to race. “Julie thought of her car not so much as a rolling sculpture but rather a performative painting.” Notably, the professional drivers of these cars don’t treat them as precious objects and race to win. Jenny Holzer’s car won in 1999, while Roy Lichtenstein’s came in sixth in 1977, though first in its class. Mehretu’s car crashed at Le Mans. “The drivers were overeager,” Girst said. While the art cars themselves are not licensed products, many are produced in miniature as editions costing between €199 and €1,000, available at BMW dealerships or online. The artists receive a royalty for each miniature sold, and some have been more sought-after than others. Both the Warhol and Koons miniatures have sold out, while the unlimited edition of Mehretu’s has already sold more than 9,000.

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