Claes Oldenburg: Art is in every simple thing

Claes Oldenburg has spent a long life transforming everyday life into art using the simplest means.

Friendly art, mischievous art, slightly ironic art – in short, the kind of art that many people see as a welcome enrichment of their everyday lives. Claes Oldenburg's art is seen by so many as a welcome enrichment of their everyday lives. That's why he is considered one of the most important representatives of American Pop Art, on a par with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein .

But Andy Warhol is number one on the world art rankings, while Claes Oldenburg is only at number 80. Around 2008, he was almost at number 50, and since then his ranking has fluctuated between approximately 60th and 80th place. For Andy Warhol, there are no fluctuations, only a straight line to his unshakeable number one position.

There are many different reasons for this, but they all share a common principle: In societies with many insecure people, all the sheep follow a leader because they don't dare to express their own opinion. And the leader is always the one who shouts the loudest. In this case, that's clearly Andy Warhol. But at least he didn't set out with the intention of harming his followers, unlike the sinister new figures on the political stage.

Claes Oldenburg's path to art

Claes Oldenburg was born in Stockholm in 1929, but was only able to enjoy very little carefree Swedish childhood: His father was stationed in New York as a Swedish diplomat, where Oldenburg initially grew up from 1930 to 1933.

In his sixth and seventh years, Oldenburg was allowed to count gnomes in Oslo, Norway – not quite his homeland, but little Claes certainly had “more Sweden” around him in Oslo than in New York.

Perhaps he even read one of the Christmas stories that Astrid Lindgren published anonymously in a Stockholm newspaper in 1933 as her early literary endeavors? For many years, Lindgren wrote short stories anonymously for magazines. In 1941, when her daughter was ill in bed, she took up the name Pippi Longstocking and asked for stories about the newborn protagonist. This chance encounter made Lindgren a writer.

Astrid Lindgren invented stories about and with Pippi Longstocking and also wrote them down; “Pippi Longstocking” was rejected by some publishers in 1944 and won first prize in a competition held by a second publisher in 1945… but Claes Oldenburg could not have guessed in 1936 that an important heroine would soon emerge in the north; rather, he innocently followed his parents to Chicago, where his father was appointed Consul General of Sweden and where Oldenburg went to school until 1946.

Having largely escaped the World War in their homeland of Europe in this way was certainly also important.

Oldenburg attended the prestigious Latin School of Chicago , a private day school in the Gold Coast neighborhood, where he graduated in 1946. From the Latin School, the path to Yale open (for those who have just woken up and were born in the post-Y era: this refers to Yale University, the third oldest university in the United States and one of the most famous of these elite institutions that, in addition to incredibly talented people, also produce misfits like the Bush brothers). Oldenburg studied art and English literature there from 1946 to 1950.

If Oldenburg had ever been hindered in his free development by his parents' home (which is less likely in diplomatic households than in the average household, because diplomats travel the world and because the world makes one worldly-wise), that was history after his graduation from Yale:

Oldenburg took courses at the Art Institute of Chicago The Art Institute of Chicago consists of an art museum (which, with its collection of 300,000 works spanning five millennia, was named the best museum in the world in the 2014 TripAdvisor Travelers' Choice Awards) and an art school, and although it was founded on the initiative of wealthy citizens, it is, like most art institutions, rather freethinking.

The last time the Art Institute of Chicago surprised the general public was in 2016 when it Vincent Van Gogh's "Bedroom in Arles" in Chicago and rented it out via Airbnb in collaboration with advertising agency Leo Burnett (Marlboro Man and more).

The campaign came at just the right time for Leo Burnett Chicago, as the agency had recently lost the energy-killer McDonald's (Kids, Tweens and the Chicago area), the sugar bomb Kellogg's Special K and also the (hideously ugly?) Chevrolet Silverado as clients – compared to Always Ultra campaigns for their only remaining major client Procter & Gamble, marketing a famous bedroom is certainly a 100% gain in sensuality in the daily work routine.

Airbnb is happy with anything that brings them tax-free money, but the real winner was the Art Institute of Chicago, which in this way drew the attention Van Gogh

Although it was still 1950, Claes Oldenburg was already 21 years old and, like any young person in a time when exploitation wasn't lurking behind every other job, aspired to independence. For this reason, he worked as a journalist and graphic designer for the Chicago City News Bureau during his studies.

Oldenburg exhibited his work for the first time in 1953, presenting satirical drawings , largely representational like his early paintings, but strongly influenced by Abstract Expressionism . That same year, he opened his own studio and became a US citizen – Oldenburg was ready to conquer the art world, but the art world wasn't quite ready for him yet.

Therefore, in 1956 Oldenburg first moved to the center of the American art world, to New York City made ends meet with a part-time job in the library of the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration

During the rest of the time he met other artists, Jim Dine, Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow, Lucas Samaras, George Segal and many other happening artists, who finally detached him from performing arts and awakened his enthusiasm for collages and objects .

From 1958 onwards, Oldenburg began objects from papier-mâché and waste materials , covering them with brightly colored fabric. His first exhibition of three-dimensional works also featured these objects (May 1959, Judson Gallery, Judson Memorial Church, Washington Square).

In 1960, his Lower East Side neighborhood of Oldenburg inspired him to create new sculptures , simply rendered figures, letters, and signs made of cardboard, jute, and newspaper; in 1961, he designed sculptures made of chicken wire covered with plaster-soaked canvas and enamel paint, for the first time depicting everyday objects such as clothing or food.

In 1960, Oldenburg also began creating happenings with his new Pop Art friends, the “Ray Gun Theater” with Lucas Samaras, Tom Wesselman, Carolee Schneemann, Oyvind Fahlstrom, and Richard Artschwager . His first wife , Patty Mucha, not only sewed Oldenburg soft sculptures but also appeared as a regular performer in his happenings. Art critics discovered garish colors and alienation in his work, but initially not much more than that.

Art by Claes Oldenburg

Therefore, it took until 1962 for Oldenburg to achieve its breakthrough.

Oldenburg was 33, fairly newly married to Patty Mucha, who was born Patricia Muschinski in Milwaukee and had come to her husband in fulfillment of all clichés: she was one of his nude models when Oldenburg made forays into portrait painting (and probably also nude painting , but you need so few nude models for portraits) in his early New York days.

Patty Mucha was also an artist, and the couple began working together. Oldenburg had briefly flirted with “Soft Sculptures” , but the section-laced women's stocking filled with newspaper, now revered “Sausage” jessesartspace.wordpress.com ), failed to truly captivate the art world at the time.

Now he tackled the Softies again with Patty, in 1962 creating “in one go” the “Floor Cake” , a slice of cake made of latex on canvas, painted with synthetic polymer paint, filled with foam rubber and cardboard: www.moma.org/collection/works/81450 .

and the “Floor Cone” , an ice cream cone produced in the same way: www.moma.org/collection/works/81461 and, to conclude the dulling stomach fillers, the “Floor Burger” , actually a Whopper, complete with bun, patty and pickle.

What was special about these three works were their dimensions: “Floor Cake” 2.9 x 1.48 x 1.48 meters, “Floor Cone” 3.45 x 1.42 x 1.36 meters, “Floor Burger” 2.13 meters in diameter and 1.3 meters high.

The soft sculptures were the stars of the exhibition at the Green Gallery in New York , and they immediately appealed to the eager American public. Even as the giant ice cream cone was being transported to the Green Gallery in a pickup truck along West Fifty-Seventh Street, children cheered in passing cars, and adults cheered inside the gallery – everything was fine, Oldenburg was a made man.

A cake the size of a sofa as art? Seriously?

Whether it's a sofa-sized slice of cake, a giant ice cream cone, or a megalomaniacal burger – none of it would stand a chance of being celebrated as a sensation in the art world today. At best, it might be celebrated as a sensation in a struggling restaurant whose owner, lacking any culinary skills, opens an XXL restaurant after a visit from a celebrity chef on a reality TV show. But a sofa-sized cake is only a one-off hit.

What was it about these works of art that so captivated people back then?

Quite simply: It was art for people – however silly it was, this art took people seriously, and it was aimed at ALL people.

Until Pop Art, there was hardly any cheeky, humorous art; art was something for educated people who had to have this art and the ideas behind it explained to them by even more educated art historians in “profound” terms, in order to then admire it with awe.

But the young artists of the 1960s—Oldenburg, Warhol, Liechtenstein, and countless others around them—did not want to create art that inspires awe; on the contrary, they wanted to dismantle the awe surrounding art and create art for all people in a truly democratic manner. This, in turn, explains their motives: those who want to create art for everyone will not get far with ivory towers but should instead choose motifs that are familiar to everyone.

Because of this approach, not only did Oldenburg's spirited art find great popularity, but it also provides the content-based explanation for why Warhol rose to number 1 in the art market while Oldenburg remained in the 50s to 80s.

Warhol took an even more radical approach: he not only freed the artwork from its disturbing seriousness, but also, with his serial production method, very thoroughly from the myth of uniqueness.

Soup cans as art – Andy Warhol's "Campbell's Soup Cans" also first appeared in 1962 – were already somewhat unheard of, because compared to cake, burgers, and ice cream, they were perfectly ordinary everyday food. The cans have now appeared in polymer paint on no fewer than 32 canvases. 32 because there were 32 varieties of Campbell's soup. This fact mocked the venerable art world, which could write, or at least did write, thick books about the uniqueness of individual works of art, and did so even more thoroughly than any cake or burger could.

Despite the risk of sounding sarcastic: Oldenburg is still alive; In terms of popularity in the art world, Andy Warhol was a rather unfortunate Andy Warhol: He cleared the stage in 1987, and Robert Rauschenberg in 2008, allowing their now limited artistic output to increase in value. At the same time, art historians were finally given the opportunity to comment on the respective art without fear of contradiction from the artist.

But all of this is a retrospective view – when Oldenburg conquered the art world, he topped the artist rankings alongside Robert Rauschenberg (now No. 13), and was invited to the Venice Biennale and Documenta. For a considerable time, he was far more sought after than Andy Warhol. At just 40 years old, MoMA in New York celebrated him with his first major exhibition; that was in 1969.

This is perhaps the funniest or most macabre conclusion to the spirit of change in the 1960s: Today, art historians are still writing thick books about the artworks and the people of artists like Oldenburg, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Lichtenstein , and others who wanted to liberate art from art history…

Decades of world-expanding art

But back to Claes Oldenburg's feel-good art (which the US poet Frank O'Hara, who put the works of his artist friends into words until he was run over by a beach buggy in 1966, described as "magical and strange"):

Mountains of burgers and sofa-sized slices of cake were Claes Oldenburg's first creations. These were followed by giant fries, double cheeseburgers, and a collapsed toilet, and from around 1965 onwards, Claes Oldenburg definitively decided to enlarge our world, at least visually, through colossal objects

• “Lipstick (Ascending) on ​​Caterpillar Tracks” was created in 1969 , Tower Pkwy, New Haven, CT 06511, USA
• 1970 the large plug “Plug”
• 1976 the “Clothespin” , Market St & S 15th St, Philadelphia, PA 19102, USA

Then Coosje van Bruggen along and began working with Oldenburg, after she had helped him install a work of art on the grounds of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands. That was in 1976; the two married in 1977 and from then on created “Large-Scale Projects” .

• 1977 “Giant Pool Balls” , Sculpture Projects Münster
• 1981 “Flashlight ,” University of Nevada, Las Vegas
• The sculpture “Pickaxe” , 12 meters high and created for Documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982

And so it continued, until the famous “Cupid’s Span” made of fiberglass and steel (2002, Rincon Park, San Francisco in 2002) and the “Tumbling Tacks” (2009, Kistefos Sculpture Park north of Oslo, last joint work before van Bruggen’s death in the same year).

Oldenburg's most recent major work is the impressive "Paint Torch" , a brush made of steel and fiberglass with LED lighting, which was unveiled in 2001 in front of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

The most beautiful art for art games

These were just a few examples; the world is full of Oldenburg's playfully ironic art. This art can also be a lot of fun for imaginative people, for example, as a scavenger hunt. Who can find the meat platter and the cake plate, the green lady's slippers, the cheesecake, the freestanding washbasin, the soft Swedish light switch, "Bedroom Ensemble Replicas," and the "Tubes Supported by its Content" —after all, they're all around the world in giant format!

An excursion into the art of explanation could also prove entertaining if the debate were based on a work of art by Claes Oldenburg: Why is there a tie over ten meters high, "fluttering" upwards, in front of a skyscraper in Frankfurt am Main? What is the artist trying to tell us?

Cultural anthropological, contemporary historical, textile science, esoteric, media-theoretical, sociological of religion, scientometric, pedagogical-didactic, cybernetic, engineering geodesic, human medical perspective?

Some Oldenburg artworks spark a firework of recycling ideas : What else could one do with the “Garden Hose with Tap” , Freiburg im Breisgau, besides just leaving it standing around in the park?

All of this is a rather undignified approach to Claes Oldenburg's art, but one that the artist would certainly have liked.

Claes Oldenburg: Public life, exhibitions, awards

One doesn't become the 80th artist in the world without a public presence. Claes Oldenburg has been in over 1,000 exhibitions since the 1960s , 100 of which were at the Museum of Modern Art in New York alone. If the impression arose that Claes Oldenburg's brother, Richard E. Oldenburg, art historian and director of MoMA from 1972 to 1993, had a hand in this, this impression was corrected in 2009.

This year, Claes Oldenburg sold his sculpture “Typewriter Eraser” (from 1976, one of three lovely large erasers: c1.staticflickr.com/ ) for $2.2 million via Christie’s New York, even though his brother, after his time at MoMA, was Chairman of Sotheby’s North and South America until 2000 and subsequently Honorary Chairman of Sotheby’s…

Awards and honors

Oldenburg boasts an impressive list of awards :

• 1970 Honorary doctorate from Oberlin College, Ohio
• 1971 Brandeis University Sculpture Award
• 1972 Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture
• 1975 Member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters
• 1976 Art Institute of Chicago, First Prize Sculpture Award at the 72nd American Exhibition
• 1977 Medal of the American Institute of Architects
• 1978 Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 1979 Honorary Doctorate, Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois
• 1980 Induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 1981 Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize for Sculpture, Duisburg, Germany
• 1989 Wolf Prize in Arts
• 1993 Brandeis University Creative Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement + Jack I. and Lillian Poses Medal for Sculpture
• 1994 Distinction in Sculpture, Sculpture Center, New York (Oldenburg + Van Bruggen)
• 1995 Rolf Schock Foundation Prize, Stockholm, Sweden
• 1995 Honorary Doctorate, Bard College, New York
• 1996 Nathaniel S. Saltonstall Award, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (Oldenburg + Van Bruggen)
• 1996 Honorary Doctorate Royal College of Art, London
• 1996 honorary degrees from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, California (Oldenburg + Van Bruggen)
• 1999 Honorary Doctors University of Teesside, Middlesbrough, England (Oldenburg + Van Bruggen)
• 2000 National Medal of Arts, USA
• 2002 Partners in Education Award, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (Oldenburg + Van Bruggen)
• 2004 Medal Award from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Oldenburg + Van Bruggen)
• 2005 Honorary Doctorates Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Nova Scotia (Oldenburg + Van Bruggen)
• 2005 Honorary doctorates from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan (Oldenburg + Van Bruggen)

The artist, who usually radiates good cheer in person, now lives in New York, is approaching his 90th decade, and as the “Grandpa of Pop Art” constantly encourages young artists to take art as little seriously as he did.

The official website of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen could be found at www.oldenburgvanbruggen.com (no longer online) and offered a Large-Scale Projects Image Gallery with Case Histories, biographies of the artists and selected publications (all in English).

A few days before this article was written, the New York Times Style Magazine published an article about Claes Oldenburg and—among other things—the mysterious funerary art he created long ago in New York, which hardly anyone knows about to this day. Even at 88, Claes Oldenburg was clearly still capable of surprising us; let's hope that continues for a long time to come ( www.nytimes.com/ , with a slideshow of Claes Oldenburg's art "through the years" ).

Physical works by Claes Oldenburg are currently on display in New York. The exhibition “Shelf Life” at the Pace Gallery is open until November 11, 2017 (works by Oldenburg/van Bruggen; an article about the exhibition will appear in The New Yorker on November 6: www.newyorker.com/ ). “Three Dimensions: Modern & Contemporary Approaches to Relief and Sculpture” at the Acquavella Galleries, Inc., runs until November 17, 2017. Alternatively, the exhibition “Cultivating the Garden” “The Show Must Go On – From the Contemporary Art Collection” can be visited until January 21, 2018

Public art collections

If you can't travel there right now, you can find his works in the few public art collections in the world that have acquired Oldenburg art:

• Australia : National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ACT
• Belgium : Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels
• Brazil : Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC/USP), São Paulo
• Denmark : Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Museet for Samtidskunst / Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde
• Germany : Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Museum of Modern Art (MMK), Frankfurt/Main; Hamburger Kunsthalle; Wilhelm Hack Museum Ludwigshafen; Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein
• Finland : Kiasma – Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki
• France : Musee d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain Nice (MAMAC), Nice; Center Pompidou, Paris; Musée d'art moderne et contemporary de Saint-Étienne (MAMC), Saint-Etienne
• Great Britain : Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, West Sussex; Leeds Art Gallery; Tate Britain and Tate Modern, London
• Canada : National Gallery of Canada – Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa, ON; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, ON
• Colombia : Museo de Moderno Arte de Bogotá (MAMBO), Bogota
• Israel : The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
• Italy : Centro de Arte Moderna e Contemporanea della Spezia (CAMeC), La Spezia; Museo D'Arte Contemporanea Donna Regina (MADRE), Naples; Museo d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (MART), Rovereto; Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Turin
• Japan : Kawasaki City Museum; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo
• Netherlands : Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam; Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Vledder Museum
• Austria : Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation (MUMOK), Vienna
• Portugal : Berardo Museum, Lisbon
• Spain : Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Alicante (MACA), Alicante; Fundación Joan Miró and Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Barcelona
• Sweden : Malmö Konsthall, Malmö; Moderna Museet, Stockholm
• Switzerland : Kunstmuseum Basel
• Hungary : Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art Budapest
• USA : Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH; The University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA), Ann Arbor, MI; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Housatonic Museum of Art, Bridgeport, CT; List Visual Arts Center (LVAC), Cambridge, MA; Tarble Arts Center, Charleston, IL; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), Chicago, IL;
  Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA; Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC; Meadows Museum, Dallas, TX; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX; The Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH;
  Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA; Koehnline Museum of Art, Des Plaines, IL; The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX; Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, MI; Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell, IA; The Menil Collection, Houston, TX; Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH), Houston, TX; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Ewing Gallery of Art and Architecture, Knoxville, TN; Samek Art Museum, Lewisburg, PA; Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA; MOCA Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA; The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA), Madison, WI; The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX; The Margulies Collection, Miami, FL; Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (MOCA), Miami, FL; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, NY; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, NY; Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, Norman, OK; Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, OH; Miami University Art Museum, Oxford, OH; Norton Simon Museum of Art, Pasadena, CA; The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO;
  The de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), San Francisco, CA; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; Sioux City Art Center, Sioux City, IA; Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford, CA; University Art Gallery – Indiana State University, Terre Haute, IN; Palmer Museum of Art, University Park, PA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL (one could probably have written: in almost every museum in the USA with contemporary art, but that would be a little unfair to those who want to choose a museum from the article for their next trip to the USA)

Claes Oldenburg, brief biography

• Claes Oldenburg was born on January 28, 1929 in Stockholm
• From 1946 to 1950, he studied art and English literature at Yale University.
• From 1950 to 1954, Oldenburg attended courses at the Art Institute of Chicago
• Oldenburg exhibited his art in more than 1000 exhibitions worldwide from 1960 onwards
• Oldenburg married his first wife, artist Patty Mucha, in 1960; after 10 years of working together, this marriage ended in divorce in 1970
• From 1969 to 1977, Oldenburg lived in a romantic and professional partnership with the American artist Hannah Wilke
• Oldenburg and the artist Coosje van Bruggen married in 1977
• From 1977 until van Bruggen's death in 2009, numerous collaborative artworks were created
• In 1992, Oldenburg and van Bruggen bought Château de la Borde, a small Loire château in Beaumont-sur-Dême, where they set up their own small museum with works by Le Corbusier, Charles and Ray Eames, Alvar Aalto, Frank Gehry and Eileen Gray.
• Oldenburg has received numerous awards, prizes and honorary doctorates (partly together with Coosje van Bruggen)

Claes Oldenburg on art:

I am for the art that emerges from the sewer holes in winter fog. I am for the art that splits when you step on a frozen puddle. I am for the art of the worm in the apple

(rarely quoted passage from his most famous piece, the semi-satirical manifesto “I Am For…” from 1961).

Claes Oldenburg has died at the age of 93

Claes Oldenburg, the Swedish-born American pop artist known for his monumental sculptures of everyday objects, died on Monday, July 18, 2022, at his home and studio in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan. He was 93 years old.

His death was confirmed by Adriana Elgarresta, a spokeswoman for the Pace Gallery in New York, which, along with the Paula Cooper Gallery, had long represented him. All the leading daily newspapers, such as the New York Times and the Süddeutsche Zeitung , reported it.

Few embodied the success story of public art like him. And few artists so effortlessly reinterpreted the work of Marcel Duchamp and the readymade. The master of monumental humor leaves us an overwhelming legacy…