When is a Cady Noland not a Cady Noland? A lot rides on this question — millions of dollars and now a lawsuit. 

Contemporary art dealer Marc Jancou is suing both Sotheby’s and the reclusive artist after the auction house pulled a work he had consigned by the artist from a sale, apparently at her request. According to Jancou’s lawyer Paul J. Hanly, Jr., Noland told Sotheby’s there were problems with the work’s condition. Jancou is now suing Sotheby’s for $6 million in compensatory damages, and Noland for $20 million in punitive damages. The artwork, a silkscreen print on aluminum called "Cowboys Milking" (1990), was to be included in a contemporary day sale on November 11, 2011 and was estimated to sell for between $260,000 and $350,000. The lawsuit, filed in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, raises questions about what legal right artists have — if any — to disavow early works.

Jancou’s complaint doesn’t describe the exact circumstances of Noland’s intervention, beyond stating that she “tortiously interfered with the consignment agreement by persuading Sotheby’s to breach the agreement by refusing to put the work up for auction, despite there being no basis under the agreement to do so.” Noland is famously particular about her work, but in this case a lot was at stake. If the sale had gone through, Jancou may have stood to gain even more than the $350,000 high estimate: as Gallerist mentioned, another Noland artwork set an artist record at Sotheby’s the night before Jancou’s thwarted sale, selling for $6.6 million with premium over a high estimate of $3 million.

A statement from Sotheby’s describes the suit as "meritless." Hanley told ARTINFO that, as of Friday, neither the auction house nor Noland had filed papers in response to the suit. Jancou himself declined to comment, but his lawyer noted that Noland’s alleged claim that the work was damaged or in poor condition stands in opposition to an independent conservation report made prior to the sale. Sotheby’s auction catalogue insulates the company from such claims, saying that it can withdraw any lot at will, but, Hanley asserts, "that was not a unilateral statement, and was not part of the consignment agreement my client signed." 

The legal rights of artists over their works are murky and have been the subject of many recent battles. The Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 states that "the artist shall have the right to prevent the use of his or her name as the author of the work of visual art in the event of a distortion, mutilation, or other modification of the work which would be prejudicial to his or her honor or reputation" — yet this statute has not stopped a variety of controversies about artist's rights to control their work.

In one notorious instance, landscape artist Chapman Kelley went to battle with the Chicago Parks Department, claiming that its alteration of a bed of flowers he had created infringed on his rights under VARA; a court finally decided that landscape art was not copyrightable, but left the question open in relation to other types of work. Similarly, the artist Christoph Buchel got into a very public dispute with MASS MoCA over his installation "Training Ground for Democracy," which related to the question of whether or not the institution could show his work in a form he didn't endorse. Finally, in what is perhaps the most relevant example, last year Phillips auction house got in trouble with Damien Hirst's company Science for selling individual works that were meant to be bundled together as a set. In that case, Phillips voluntarily decided not to sell the work.