New York, February 17 Japanese artist Yoko Ono turns 90 tomorrow Saturday. During her long career, she became synonymous with avant-garde art and pacifism, and above all the widow of John Lennon, to whom she served as inspiration for the creation of “Imagine”, considered the best song by the solo artist and one of the best themes of the 20th century.
Ono continues to live in the Dakota Building in New York, across from where Lennon was murdered on December 8, 1980.
The artist, who is just 1.58 meters tall, was born in Tokyo in 1933 into a family of pianists and bankers and attended top schools but only lasted a few semesters at Gakushuin University, but there , she felt “like a pet receiving information,” according to an excerpt collected by The New Yorker.
After leaving college in 1953, she went to live with her parents in New York, where she became a student at Sarah Lawrence College for Women.
FULLY IN AVANT-GUARDISM
Three years later, she married pianist Toshi Ichiyanagi and moved to Manhattan, where the couple began a life of experimental art and music.
In the 1960s, Ono belonged to the avant-garde group Flexus. In the fall of 1961, he gave his first concert at Carnegie Recital Hall and published the book “Grapefruit” in 1964.
In 1962, she divorced Toshi and, after a long process, married Anthony Cox, film producer and art promoter, in 1963. Together they had a daughter the same year whom they named Kyoko Chan Cox.
In 1965, Ono created one of his most popular works “Cut Piece” in New York, a performance in which the artist dresses in his best clothes and lets the audience cut his outfit (even his underwear ) while she remains almost motionless without saying anything. .
1966 is the year when she breaks with her second husband – from whom she officially divorces in 1969 – and meets the one who will become her third husband, John Lennon.
AN INSEPARABLE COUPLE
Their first meeting was when the Beatles attended his “Yoko at Indica” exhibition in London. At the time, Lennon was married to Cynthia Powell (whom he divorced in 1968).
As Lennon revealed in a 1971 interview with Rolling Stone, in May 1968 the musician invited Ono to his home when Powell was away.
“(Ono) came home and didn’t know what to do, so we went up to my studio and I played her all the tapes I made, all that wacky stuff and electronic music. She was really impressed and then she said, ‘Okay, let’s make a (tape) ourselves’, so we made (the experimental album) ‘Two Virgins’. It was midnight when we started ‘Two Virgins’, we finished in the wee hours of the morning and then had sex in the wee hours of the morning. It was so beautiful,” Lennon said then.
Ono and Lennon have become inseparable, as seen in the documentary ‘The Beatles: Get Back’ (2021), which explores through hours of recordings how the British band created their latest album, ‘Let It Be’ in 1970, and where they met to see how Ono always appeared within feet of Lennon.
When the four long hairs parted ways, Beatles fans and the press named Ono “the culprit”, an image that stayed with her throughout her life, despite Lennon’s denials.
“She didn’t break up the Beatles, how can a woman break up the Beatles? The Beatles broke up on their own,” Lennon said during a 1971 TV show he attended with Ono. .
He complained in that same interview that Ono was never “thanked” for “all the great music” the band members then made solo. Perhaps he was thinking of “Imagine” (1971), Lennon’s biggest solo hit.
In a BBC interview with the couple in 1980, Lennon acknowledged that Ono co-wrote the song but did not credit it due to machismo: “It should be credited as a Lennon-Ono song because that a lot, the lyrics and the concept, comes from Yoko. But then I got a little more selfish, a little more macho, and I forgot to mention his contribution. But it comes straight from “Grapefruit,” his book.” , he said.
PEACE AND LOVE
Activism was another important pillar in Ono’s life, both with Lennon and after her husband’s death.
As a couple, their best-known protest was “Bed-ins for Peace” (1969), where they stayed in bed for days in two luxury hotels in Amsterdam and Montreal in their pajamas to protest the Vietnam War. .
One of his most beloved works alone is “IMAGINE PEACE”, which in its latest version of 2022, consisted of covering with this message of peace various emblematic places in London, Berlin, Milan, Melbourne, New York, California, Seoul and Tokyo. , among other places.
Although Ono is no longer seen much in public, she is active on social media, especially on Twitter, where she has 4.5 million followers.
The last time she was seen at a public event was in 2017 when she received the Centennial Song Award from the National Association of Music Publishers accompanied by her son, Sean Lennon, who was in charge of the push in a wheelchair.
And yet, in late January, Ono tweeted that to get out of his depression (an illness he suffered from at other times in his life) he walks “80 blocks or blocks” every day. ECE
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