In copyright and searched for - buying Picasso, Warhol and Basquiat honestly
Every artist here is still in copyright, so this site links no free image archive for them: the museum shops and the publishers are the honest routes, because they print under licence from the estate. The same names are among the most faked in the market, and the fakes are not only cheap posters signed in a stranger's hand. Between 1994 and 2011 a respected New York gallery, Knoedler, sold almost forty forged Abstract Expressionist paintings, some as Mark Rothkos. Assume nothing.
- For the wall, buy a licensed print from a museum that owns the work. Tate prints its Rothko Seagram murals and its Hockneys, the Art Institute of Chicago its Picasso and Dali. Anything "after" an artist, or from an unnamed publisher, is decoration.
- For an original, know the catalogue. Genuine prints exist in quantity for Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol and David Hockney, and each has its reference catalogue. A sheet without a catalogue number is not identified.
- Know the traps each name has. Dali signed no prints after 1980, and he has long been alleged to have signed blank sheets that were printed on later. Warhol's name is on "Sunday B. Morning" screenprints that are not his. The Picasso estate lithographs of 1979-1982 are reproductions.
- Some originals are simply not realistic. Rothko's paintings are in museums, and Jean-Michel Basquiat's authentication committee dissolved in 2012, so a Basquiat without an unbroken provenance should be treated as a fake.
Hockney died in London on 11 June 2026, the last of these six; his work is in copyright until the end of 2096.