The Belgian artist Luc Tuymans was found guilty of copyright infringement in a legal dispute over a portrait he created in 2011. A civil court in Antwerp ruled on 15 January that Tuymans’s painting "A Belgian Politician"—a dramatically cropped image of the MP Jean-Marie Dedecker—borrowed too heavily from a photograph taken one year earlier by Katrijn Van Giel, a photojournalist for the Flemish newspaper "De Standaard."
The court has forbidden Tuymans from publicly exhibiting the painting or making additional versions of the work; he faces a €500,000 penalty if he does not comply.
