Yoko Promotes Art for John’s Sake

The immediate impression of Yoko Ono is one of beauty, warmth, and perhaps a forced lightness. Gone is the somewhat grim figure of an avant garde artist in black gear.

Friday, Ono wore a soft, eggshell-colored silk pantsuit for an interview to promote an exhibit of her late husband John Lennon’s serigraphs, lithographs, tapestries and sculptures.

Ono is surprisingly petite, a feature Lennon captured--even exaggerated--in the playful colored serigraph, “Watch the Holes Yoko.” It is a cartoonish side view of them, nude, walking hand in hand toward a series of holes. Lennon drew Ono as a short, childlike figure whose head comes only to his hips. She stretches on tiptoe to hold his hand.

Most of Lennon’s works in the exhibit convey playful imagery. Even his erotic portraits of Ono from the Bag One series reveal a sort of boyish fascination with lovemaking. There is tenderness and passion in his work, a sexual devotion, but nothing intrinsically erotic or titillating.

Aside from Lennon’s own celebrity as a rock ‘n’ roll legend, what then is the attraction of his art on display at the Dyansen Gallery? Ono talked of the quality of whimsy, and said Lennon’s drawings have been compared to those of James Thurber.

“It has that kind of wit, sense of humor, warmth,” she said.

She spoke of its warm, sensual lines, its simplicity and lack of artifice.

“But usually, the art world likes to see an artist being a bit more serious. And playfulness is like equated with not being artistic,” she said. “In that sense, the art world really needs this kind of artwork.”

Ono has appointed herself keeper of the Lennon art flame. For the past three years, she has attended a series of openings of Lennon exhibits at galleries around the country. The prints in the San Diego exhibit were drawn from 1968 to 1979.

During Friday’s interview, in a dimly lighted gallery office, she retained her privacy behind wrap-around Porsche sunglasses, and though she answered questions warmly, her manner seemed to dictate a polite distance. It was as if she understood the importance of personal promotion, of the necessity to create a dialogue with people for whom John Lennon has been an almost mythical figure, but knows she can’t give them what they want.

But she said the process has been personally exhilarating.

“It turned out to be an incredible experience for me. This is the only way I can get to see people who loved John. John and I basically never believed that it was just New York and just museums, that sort of thing. We always believed we were with the people.

“It’s great to come to the different cities and meet sensitive people and young people who really understand John’s work, and this has given me that opportunity. And also, by going through this kind of thing, it’s almost like we’re still together, doing things together. It’s a great feeling.”

Lennon’s uncomplicated figurative sketches are in a way the antithesis of Ono’s avant garde conceptual and performance oriented art. His creativity came from Western working class simplicity and, in some ways, innocence; hers from the Japanese upper class and a philosophy grounded in Eastern spiritualism.

They were odd bedfellows, to be sure.

The pair met in 1968 at Indica Gallery in London. It was the peak of Beatlemania, and John was one of the world’s most famous pop icons. Ono was highly regarded by other artists, but she had achieved little critical acclaim and was virtually unknown outside the avant garde art community.

Ono had an exhibit of “instruction paintings” at the Indica, some of which asked viewers to do such things as hammer nails into a blank “painting.” What was it in her work that attracted the interest of the pop star from Liverpool?

Lennon answered that question for the National Observer in 1972:

“When Yoko came into my life, nothing else seemed important,” Lennon said. “Her work and her way of life and her mind . . . just blew my mind open, and I saw that what I was doing with the Beatles was just trivia.”

John and Yoko were married in 1969 and became the subjects of fascination for both the media and the public throughout the world. They flaunted their eccentricities and their politics by posing nude for an album cover and by allowing newsmen into their honeymoon suite for a non-explicit photo opportunity to promote world peace.

Ono was blamed by Beatles fans for the break-up of the group, and Lennon even acknowledged that she “may have been the last straw.”

John and Yoko, with their infant son Sean, were living in the Dakota apartments in New York City when, on Dec. 8, 1980, Lennon was shot to death by Mark David Chapman.

Their relationship was often strained, and they were separated in 1973 and 1974. But most of the Lennon prints on display here recall the good times.

“American Dream” reveals the couple snuggled in a bed above a notation, “an apple pie bed.”

“I Do” pictures the couple at the critical moment of their marriage rite.

“Honeymoon” shows them as tourists hurrying along a sidewalk, Ono in a large floppy hat and Lennon with his trademark wire rim specs.

Ono has had Lennon’s prints transferred into neon, tapestries and sculpture. The prices range from about $600 to $5,000.

Asked about the irony of showing Lennon’s art in a gallery that normally features the populist artist Erte, Ono said it had to do with communication.

“The thing is that you have to understand . . . John was into communication with the Beatles. They even communicated with lunch boxes you know. Because rock ‘n’ roll is now accepted as an art form and critics are taking it seriously and all that, there is a little bit of ivory tower kind of situation. So they say, ‘Why would you do this? It’s a bit tacky for him isn’t it? Do you think it’s all right to translate into a neon work . . . and that kind of thing?’ I think it’s fine.”

Neon or shag tapestries or T-shirts are just another media, she said.

“And also the practical side is of course . . . that there might be some people who are only into tapestry, but not into John Lennon at all . . .

“You have to understand that if I don’t keep generating his work on this level or on any level, he will be an artist that you would just go to and look up in a library or museum. And that is not what he wanted to become. He was a now artist. He wanted to be right on the street.”