The Brooklyn Rail

In a 2013 conversation with Elvis Mitchell in Interview magazine, Yoko Ono described her constantly-evolving art and music as motivated by the mainstream derision she faced:

I was able to go on and on and on doing what I was doing because what I was doing was rejected. So it’s a blessing, in a way—a very strange blessing. Because if what I was doing back then would have been totally accepted—you know, “Now, Yoko, do that one again! We love it!”—then I would have been dead as an artist, stuck in one place.

Ono’s humorous, prickly, and politically-charged work is now roundly celebrated by the museum establishment and influential critics, garnering the wide acclaim that eluded her in earlier decades.

David Sheff’s Yoko: A Biography traces this transformation in public regard, covering her lifespan but dwelling on the ridicule she faced as the wife of John Lennon and her critical renaissance in recent decades. The book’s strongest section, however, covers the period prior to her fabled 1966 meeting with Lennon at Indica Gallery in London. Born in 1933 to one of Japan’s wealthiest families, Ono was raised in an environment rich in material comfort but lacking in emotional warmth. During the United States’s bombing of Tokyo in 1945, Ono and her brother Kei were sent away to the family’s small, unfinished home in the Nagano prefecture. With food scarce, Ono would instruct Kei to imagine a delicious menu to motivate them to survive; Kei described this as his sister’s “first conceptual art piece.” Sheff details Ono’s self-assured demeanor, devotion to avant-garde art, and pivotal move to New York, touching on her production of performances at her Chambers Street loft, early encounters with John Cage and George Maciunas, her marriages to Toshi Ichiyanagi and Anthony Cox, the birth of her daughter Kyoko, and the development of landmark works such as Painting to Be Stepped On (1960/61), Cut Piece (1964), and Grapefruit (1964). Though readers who are deeply familiar with Ono’s output may find this section simplistic, with its quick descriptions of artworks bookended by legitimizing quotations from art historians, it concisely relays the momentum of her personal life and the cheeky, imaginative tone of her instructions and objects.

The narrative begins to sag under its own weight once Ono encounters Lennon. Famously demonized for “breaking up the Beatles”—an accusation that insultingly discounts the agency of the band—Ono found a true collaborator in her third husband. Together, they created artworks and albums, but Sheff’s telling concentrates so heavily on the (often negative) reception of these productions that the witty, abrasive work itself begins to fade away. His recounting of the couple’s eighteen-month separation is more illuminating, focusing on Ono’s independent artistic pursuits and friendships rather than Lennon’s much-chronicled “lost weekend.” The couple reunited in 1975 and their son Sean was born later that year, initiating a period of domestic bliss that was cut tragically short by Lennon’s murder in 1980.

Sheff conducted Lennon’s last interview, later published in Playboy, and he became friends with Ono in the years following her husband’s murder. In the introduction, Sheff describes this relationship and ponders if a journalist is capable of telling the truth about a friend; ultimately, he decides that biographies in this vein “are uniquely insightful precisely because of the relationships between the authors and their subjects.” Unfortunately, Sheff only discloses his observations at a tactful reserve, avoiding accusations of telling-all by relying heavily on quotations from Ono, her son Sean Ono Lennon, her former romantic partner Sam Havadtoy, and publicist and family friend Elliot Mintz to describe the difficult period of betrayals and danger after Lennon’s death. With the rare exception of a paragraph about Ono’s “terrifying paroxysms” of grief, Sheff’s first-person sections are rare and glancing. After a description of Ono’s reliance on psychics following Lennon’s death, Sheff immediately explains this fairly benign behavior as coming from “a desperate attempt to find answers about what had happened and to protect herself from very real threats,” leaping to preemptively defend Ono from imaginary critics in this fashion throughout the book. Given the misogyny, racism, and cruelty directed at Ono for the majority of her life, Sheff’s defensive attitude is understandable, but it makes these parts of the biography a brittle read for those who already regard the artist with sympathy and interest.

The final chapters address Ono’s critical reappraisal, including retrospectives at the Japan Society (2000), the Museum of Modern Art (2015), and the Tate Modern (2024); successful dance remixes of her songs; and tribute albums and concerts, as well as her moving reunion with Kyoko in 1994 and her continual advocacy for peace. Speaking to Mitchell at age eighty, Ono summed up the outlook that enabled this continued resilience:

I started to feel that if no one else loved me, then I had to love myself. I thought, “Darling, you know you work so hard. You are always trying to do good. But somehow it’s not being appreciated. I feel sorry for you.” That’s what I was thinking at the time—and I kind of like myself for being that one who survived regardless.

Though the back half of Yoko: A Biography may prove too restrained and well-trodden for art-historical audiences, Sheff conveys Ono’s strength, inventiveness, and staying power in a way that will likely resonate with readers eager to expand their understanding of her life and art.