Joan Mitchell Has Done an Amazing Job and Is Getting Recognized More and More: Alberto Mugrabi channels his inner Trump in this Bloomberg piece on Joan Mitchell mania in the wake of her record sales in May:

• “It’s her moment to shine,” said Alberto Mugrabi, a collector and private art dealer, who bought a 1960s Mitchell painting in Basel in 2014. It was priced at $1.5 million. “She’s a phenomenal artist, and people recognize it more and more.” …

BusinessWeek Publishes a Takedown of Bernardo Paz, His Art Ambitions, and His  Criminal Convictions: Half a catalogue of Bernardo Paz’s freewheeling career in the mining business, half a look at his massive, remote art park, Inhotim, BusinessWeek comes at Berardo Paz with the knives out:

• “Inhotim wouldn’t open its gates until 2006, but the project became all-consuming. Paz wanted to create something more than a world-class collection—something unique, transformational. He hired the best curators he could find. One was Allan Schwartzman, now chairman of the fine art division at Sotheby’s, who started working on Inhotim in 2003. […] “I don’t know anyone who’s collected on the scale he’s collected without an eye toward what this means in terms of long-term value,” Schwartzman says. Paz also stood out for putting every free penny into collecting. One dealer remembers him walking up to her stand at a fair, identifying three pieces he liked, and buying them without a second thought. As soon as Paz moved on, an Inhotim curator stayed behind to cancel the sales, explaining that he was trailing Paz to “unbuy” impulsive purchases.”

You can listen to the story here. …

Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Begins Wind Down with Donations to Whitney, Smithsonian: The New York Times details the foundation’s decision to move some of the remaining work into a museums and archives:

• “The foundation is announcing this week that it is giving around 400 artworks in all media by the Pop Art master — about half its holdings — to the Whitney Museum of American Art. […] The new Whitney material, which will establish a Roy Lichtenstein Study Collection at the museum, includes five paintings, 17 sculptures and 145 prints. (The museum already had 26 works by the artist.)”
• “The foundation will also give historical material comprising approximately half a million documents to the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. The director of the archives, Kate Haw, said she believed it was the largest single-artist trove the institution had ever received.”