![]() There is the MoMA catalogue and many more like it, from smaller galleries (her first North American retrospective toured to the AGO in 2002). There is Zoladz’s piece, which came out the same year Ono was the subject of an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art of 125 works from her early career. Is she a neglected society child, shuttled between Japan and San Francisco, seeing her father only by appointment? A rebellious art student teaching calligraphy to pay the rent and setting fire to her paintings in a downtown loft? An avant-garde outsider, a mother, a lover, earnest or ironic, one half of the most famous couple in the world? “Why is it such a perennial youthful rite of passage to misunderstand, to underestimate, even to hate her?” Lindsay Zoladz wanted to know in a 2015 essay for Vulture.īrackett’s book is part of a rehabilitation of Yoko Ono’s public image that has been taking place in recent years. Brackett’s biography of the conceptual artist, songwriter and activist, “Yoko Ono: An Artful Life,” tries to weave together a more comprehensive answer from narrative threads that form a dense knot of life. For a long time, the answer seemed clear: She was the girlfriend who broke up the Beatles, the celebrity-by-marriage who dabbled in art and music. “Who is Yoko Ono?” the critic and journalist Donald Brackett asks. Maybe this is what they meant by background. “People throwing kisses for the first time / Showering flowers, ringing bells / Telling each other, how nice she is.” Under her voice, the piano bounces along. “She likes to ride a coffin car,” Ono sings on the track. Ono tells the story of how she was supposed to be happy in a spoken intro to a live version of “Coffin Car,” a song on her 1973 album “Feeling the Space.” She describes the feeling of those first years with Lennon, when a whole society called her ugly (she’d always thought of herself as an attractive woman), hurled racist insults at her and told her that they wanted her to die. “The artist absorbs an element from their muse that has nothing to do with words,” Pattie Boyd, who was married to George Harrison when Ono met Lennon, told Taylor Swift in 2018, “just the purity of their essence.” Boyd would know - puts her first in its list of “The All Time Greatest Muses in the Music World.” Ono only manages eleventh. In the background she might have been a more perfect muse. Maybe give up her work - the art career she had, by that point, spent almost a decade building. She should stick to the background, and not talk too much. Once, in the early days of her relationship with John Lennon, someone told Yoko Ono how to be happy.
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