Photo: Gabe Ginsberg/Getty Images
Iconic artist Yoko Ono celebrated 90 years with a collaborative artwork. Although she is one of the pioneers of conceptual art, avant-garde and even a precursor of punk music, she is currently not recognized artistically, due to her bad reputation.
The son she had with the singer John Lennon, Sean Ono Lennon, created for her a ‘Wish Tree for Yoko On’, which is a virtual tree so that people anywhere in the world can send her a message virtually.
Paul and Ringo Starr, the living Beatles, did not make any public congratulations on Yoko’s birthday. While the official Instagram account of the Liverpool group posted: “Wishing Yoko a very happy 90th birthday, with love from The Beatles and Apple Corps.”
For a long time she was overshadowed by the fame of John Lennon, despite the fact that her artistic career was a pioneer of the avant-garde movement of the 60s.
Yoko Ono was born in Tokyo on February 18, 1933, into an aristocratic family, her father, who was a descendant of a lineage of samurai warriors, was an amateur musician, while her mother was a member of the Yasuda clan.
In 1940, his family moved to New York, but eventually they returned, and in 1945 they survived the Allied bombing.
Yoko was the first woman to be accepted into Gakushuin University’s Philosophy program; she but her a year she eloped and she married experimental composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, at seven she divorced.
This was such a blow to Ono that she had to be treated in a psychiatric institution in Japan.
She then had a relationship with film producer Anthony Cox, between 1963 and 1969. He took custody of her first daughter, Kyoko Chan Cox, whom Yoko could not see for 23 years.
In 1966, Yoko and Lennon met at the Indian Gallery in London, and were married at the age of three. Celebrating their honeymoon with a peace rally, against the Vietnam War, while in a hotel bed in Amsterdam.
Yoko had already made a career in art, among others, with avant-garde works such as her performance Cut Piece, in which the viewer had to cut pieces of her clothing with scissors until she was practically naked, or Bottoms, a short in which 365 rears were seen in close-up and with which he sought to demonstrate that “from behind, we are all equal”.
Over the years, the myth spread that he was to blame for the separation of The Beatles, but after the publication of the documentary ‘Get back’ in 2022, this theory was left without many bases.
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