The plate as printed: Georgia O'Keeffe's White Flower in the Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, June 1930, captioned Lent by Alfred Steiglitz; below, the copyright notice of the same issue, reading only Copyrighted, 1930.

The Notice That Was Missing a Name

On page 119 of its monthly bulletin for June 1930, the Cleveland Museum of Art printed two plates. Above, a flock of gulls by Gifford Beal, lent by the Kraushaar Galleries. Below, a white blossom filling its frame edge to edge, painted the year before by Georgia O'Keeffe and captioned, in small capitals, Lent by Alfred Steiglitz — the misspelling is the Bulletin's. Four pages earlier, at the foot of the first page of text, the issue carried its copyright notice. It runs to three words: Copyrighted, 1930.

What is absent from that line is the reason this mug can be sold in New York and Chicago, in London, Berlin and Vienna — and not in the country where it is made.

Two clocks

Anyone who reproduces a painting is dealing with two clocks that run independently. One belongs to the photograph, the other to the work. They are confused constantly, and in both directions.

Our file comes from the Cleveland Museum of Art, which publishes it under CC0. That is a real and generous release, and the museum is unusually clear about its limits: it dedicates whatever copyright it may hold in the digitized version, and — its words — "it does not change or affect the underlying copyright status of the Content that has been digitized." Elsewhere it states that responsibility for ascertaining rights "remains solely with the user."

So the first clock has stopped. The second is still running, and it is set differently in every country.

The American clock

O'Keeffe died in 1986. Under the rules most people carry in their heads, that would settle it and the work would be protected well into this century. But for anything published before 1978, American copyright did not run from the artist's death at all. It ran from publication — and publication required a printed notice carrying the name of the copyright proprietor, as § 18 of the Copyright Act of 1909 laid down. A work published without a valid notice did not lose its protection temporarily. It lost it for good.

Exhibition alone will not do it. The Supreme Court settled that in American Tobacco Co. v. Werckmeister (1907): hanging a painting in a public gallery is not a general publication, and does not put the work into the public domain. So the New York exhibition of February 1930, where this painting was shown as White Flower, N.M. and listed but not illustrated, changes nothing. Everything turns on the plate in Cleveland.

We have now read that issue in facsimile rather than in a digitised transcript. The notice, set in four lines at the foot of page 115, reads in full:

"Published monthly, excepting August and September, by The Cleveland Museum of Art, in Wade Park, Station E, Cleveland, Ohio. Subscription included in membership fee, otherwise $1.50 per year. Single copies, 15 cents. Copyrighted, 1930. Entered as second class matter March 6, 1930, at the Post Office at Cleveland, Ohio, under the Act of August 24, 1912."

Nothing follows the year. And the omission was habitual, not accidental: the November/December issue of the same volume reads "Copyright, 1930."; May 1932, "Copyright, 1932." The museum first names itself as proprietor in 1937 — "Copyright, 1937, by The Cleveland Museum of Art" — and in April of that year it printed this same painting again, this time under a complete notice.

Here is the obvious objection, and we would rather raise it ourselves. The museum's name does appear in the block, two sentences ahead of the year. Whether a name that far from the word "Copyrighted" satisfies § 18 is arguable. But there is a second difficulty for anyone who wants to save the notice: in June 1930 the museum did not own this painting. The caption says so — Lent by Alfred Steiglitz. The museum bought it later that year. A notice in the name of someone who is not the proprietor was itself a defect.

So: an argument, drawn from the printed record, that the painting entered the American public domain in 1930. No court has ever ruled on it. We think it holds. We do not pretend it is beyond argument.

The Swiss clock

Swiss law is simpler and, for us, more expensive. Article 29 of the Copyright Act grants seventy years from the author's death, without qualification and without regard to where the work came from. What the statute lacks is the rule of the shorter term — the provision that frees a work at home once it is free in its country of origin. The European Union has one (Art. 7(1) of Directive 2006/116/EC) and so does the United Kingdom (s. 12(6) CDPA), which is why the answer in Berlin, Vienna and London follows the American one. Switzerland simply counts seventy years from 1986.

In Switzerland this painting is protected until 31 December 2056.

What we did about it

We removed the product from the Swiss market catalogue. Not hidden — removed. In a Swiss browsing context the page returns 404, the mug appears neither in the shop nor in search, and it cannot be added to a cart. In an Austrian context the same mug shows a price and an active buy button. We checked both directions against the API rather than trusting the dialogue box, and we re-check after every republication of the listing.

Digiboo is a Swiss company in Küsnacht. Switzerland is our home market. We closed it, because the alternative was to sell something here that we had good reason to think we were not entitled to sell.

Two things we do not claim

The museum has cleared nothing. Its release covers the photograph; checking the rights in the work is, by its own terms, our job. The research above is ours, and so is the risk.

The name is a description, not a brand. There is no O'Keeffe signature on this mug, no portrait of her, no quotation, and no series named after her. Her name identifies a historical painting and nothing else. It asserts no connection to the artist's estate, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum or Artists Rights Society, and implies none.

If you hold rights in this work

If you act for a rights holder and believe we have this wrong, please write to fuchs@digiboo.ch. For every image we print we keep a dated sheet: source, accession number, the licence in the words of the source, and the date of download. We would rather read a correction than defend a mistake.

The object

Georgia O'Keeffe, White Flower, 1929; oil on canvas, 76.2 × 91.5 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection, 1930.2162. Open-access image released by the museum under CC0. The painting is printed whole and uncropped, centred on the front of the mug.

Writing about it in 1930, the Bulletin called it "the perfection of the 'White Flower' of Georgia O'Keeffe, which in its power of concentration holds the timeless wonder of exotic flower form." Ninety-six years later that is still the best short description of what is on the porcelain.

See the mug: Georgia O'Keeffe, White Flower, 1929 →
Available in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Austria. Not available in Switzerland, for the reason set out above.

Sources

Walther Fuchs, Küsnacht, 26 August 2026. An account of our own sourcing decisions; not legal advice.

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