Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 14, 1995 TAG: 9505130003
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STEPHEN WHITTY KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Forty years ago, John Lennon's teachers were throwing his drawings in the rubbish. Now his sketches are in New York's Museum of Modern Art.
Twenty-five years ago, Yoko Ono was attacked as the avant-garde radical who broke up the Beatles. Today, Paul, George and Ringo are making music together - and Yoko Ono is a 62-year-old business executive who presides over an empire of publishing rights, licensing agreements and fine-art prints.
Imagine.
The latest of her projects - an exhibit of Lennon drawings, lithographs and limited edition serigraphs - comes to San Jose, Calif., Thursday. When the exhibit ends next Sunday, it's off to Washington. Everything is for sale.
``I'm afraid that in the art world they decide that the artistic value and the monetary value go together,'' Ono says on the phone from her office in New York. ``You know, `Well, it's expensive so it must be good.' With John, I try not to play that game. We didn't want to make it that expensive from the beginning - I want the fans to have a part of John.''
The artwork isn't expensive, as original drawings and limited-edition prints go. But it isn't cheap. The least costly prints - ``signed'' years after Lennon's death with an embossing machine - begin at several hundred dollars. Artwork hand-signed by Lennon goes for as much as $12,000.
This is, after all, a business. ``I let John's work go on tour as a work of art,'' Ono says. ``It's not, `This is a charity, so please buy this.''' Although she says she doesn't want to overprice the work, ``I want to make sure that his value is established.'' That means selling prints.
And, apparently, it means colorizing some of Lennon's black-and-white drawings.
The idea is a bit shocking - it's as though Ted Turner got hold of ``A Hard Day's Night.'' Who came up with these washes of blue, yellow and lavender?
``I did,'' Ono confesses cheerfully. ``I'm guilty.''
The original consideration, she says, was marketing. ``Initially I had a person who would program these shows and the programmer would say if we had a color one we could put in a shop window, in the gallery window,'' she says. ``They wanted to color them and I said, `Well then at least let me know. At least let me do them' - I was a partner.''
And so in a way, everything's changed - and nothing has. John and Yoko are still making art together, nearly 30 years after they first met in a London art gallery. Even 15 years after his death their collaboration goes on - whether purist Lennon fans want it to or not. It's the Plastic Ono Band all over again, with Yoko singing in the background.
Imagine.
|n n| "Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see." (From Lennon's "Strawberry Fields")
Many people found it easy, and pleasant, to misunderstand John Winston Lennon. Was he a Teddy Boy rebel? A sensitive artist? A political radical? It depended on whether you asked a Teddy Boy, an artist or a radical.
People always preferred to see John Lennon as a mirror of themselves. For a generation that grew up in the '60s, that meant seeing him as a Beatle. He was the Bright One, the favorite Beatle of millions of kids who wore glasses and wrote poetry and made sarcastic remarks in school. (If you believe what people say now, he was everyone's favorite - after 25 years of Wings and Linda, no one's willing to admit they always preferred Paul.)
Yet in his own heart, Ono says, Lennon never stopped defining himself as an artist. And although much of his work ended up in doodles or on album covers, it belonged in galleries all along.
``He was an incredibly intuitive artist,'' she says. ``I really compare him with the biggies, you know. Somebody looked at this drawing of his in the apartment and said `Oh the lines are like Matisse' ... and I totally agree.''
The only thing that stood between Lennon and a career as a serious artist, she feels, was his own fame. ``What happened to him was a very strange story, because he started as an art student and fell in love with rock 'n' roll,'' she says. ``Because he became such a famous rock 'n' roll figure it was difficult for him to be taken seriously. The art world has its own snobbery ... so he stayed an outsider until he passed away. So in a way he went through the same route as all these struggling artists who become famous after they die.''
The San Jose exhibition includes a wide variety of Lennon's work. The earliest is ``Sherlock Lennon,'' an illustration for the book ``A Spaniard in the Works''; the latest are sketches of life in the Ono-Lennon apartment. Some, such as ``Back-off Bugaloo,'' are little more than doodles; others, such as ``Taste,'' show an almost Japanese economy of form and line. All are reproduced carefully on fine paper through a variety of techniques including stone lithography and silk-screen. All have a wonderful sense of humor.
``The reason his work has such a power, I think, is because he was not able to join the art world - once artists join the art world their work becomes affected by the criticism, and the gallery owner,'' Ono says. ``His work is kind of untouched and it has a very pure quality. It's not `Look at this - this is just one line, but actually in the history of art this is a very important line.' You don't need that kind of explanation. It's almost like a primitive art. It communicates directly to the audience. It's like his songs.''
Those songs - and the man who wrote them - had many complex and contradictory sides. The pacifist who pleaded ``Give peace a chance'' in '69 was singing ``It's those mothers turn to burn!'' three years later; the rock 'n' roll rebel who spent lost weekends with Keith Moon in 1974 was, in 1975, baking bread and keeping house.
Today most fans accept those contradictions. But in the '60s, many cut their image of John to fit their daydreams. Avant-garde art wasn't part of the pattern. Nor was an avant-garde mistress. When, after he met Ono, Lennon began to show more of himself than he had shown before - literally, on the full-frontal ``Two Virgins'' album cover - they blamed her.
He hadn't been like this when he was married to Cynthia, fans wailed. Yoko was changing him, they said, controlling his mind.
```Mind control'?'' Ono's soft voice grows quick and incredulous. ``He was the expert in it. Look at how his songs affected people's minds. ... John was not a person who could be controlled by anyone.''
When Lennon finally left his wife and wed Ono, the British press - and the world's fans - turned on them savagely.
```How dare you marry our boy,''' Ono characterizes the reaction now. ``That was a lot of it. And the fact that I was a woman and that I dared to sit next to him, instead of two feet behind him.''
She believes there was a barely unspoken racism, too. ``Someone from another race snatched `their boy' and they were angry. ... The attitude toward Oriental women is either Madame Butterfly or Dragon Lady. The Dragon Lady label used to really make me angry. But then I thought, Well dragons are very mystical, powerful creatures so I shouldn't be upset by it!''
Ono also found herself blamed by angry fans for John's experimental music (although he had been using backward tapes as far back as 1965) and for his increasingly radical politics (although, even as a lovable Beatle, he had been outspoken about organized religion and the Vietnam War). Her occasional presence on his records was greeted with horror; her own records were met with derision; her experimental films and performance art faced outright scorn.
Now, 20 years later, Ono's music has been collected in the six-CD ``Onobox.'' A show of her early art pieces with the Fluxus group came to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The Whitney has given her a retrospective.
It took her a while to get used to the attention.
``In the beginning, I thought it was maddening,'' she says. ``There was a very important French museum that came to me and wanted to show a work and I said, `Oh, just forget it! I don't need you now.' But now I've corrected that attitude, shall we say. I'm glad that my work is appreciated now. Although I always considered myself a rebel and fighting against all these institutions, and it's odd finding myself being accepted by them.''
Odder still, she thinks, is to find an acceptance for her singing. The six-CD box from Rykodisc, she says, ``was so gratifying. I couldn't believe it. Each time I put an album out there was this big sort of attack or whatever and it disappeared and I thought, oh well. And then suddenly they wanted to bring all that back so I went into the studio and re-mixed all that stuff and remembered some stuff that was not on record and added that so everything came together. If it was ideal I would have wanted two more CDs - or three.''
The world might not have been ready for nine CDs of Yoko Ono's music, but it had better prepare itself for two more.
``I was just in the studio for four months now, recording, and it will be coming out in September,'' she says. ``And the cast album is coming out for `New York Rock,' the play which I did last year. It's very refreshing because I'm not singing - refreshing to some people, I think.'' She pauses and then adds, almost apologetically, ``That's a joke.''
by CNB