Why everything you think you know about Yoko Ono is wrong
The woman who broke up the Beatles: Why everything you think you know about Yoko Ono is wrong
David Sheff spent many hours with Ono and John Lennon and has strong views on her talent - and how profoundly she changed pop culture. A popular media narrative implied that Ono somehow controlled Lennon Credit: Mark and Colleen Hayward/Redferns
Yoko Ono has been characterised as many things during her lifetime, most of them negative. Even now, she’s still lazily seen as the woman who broke up the Beatles.
But she was no groupie or hanger-on; Ono was in fact an avant-garde artist asking challenging questions about art itself long before she met Lennon, as a new book about her seeks to show. The art world has belatedly come to appreciate her, dedicating a Tate Modern retrospective to her work last year. But to many others she has always been, as her biographer David Sheff writes, “a caricature, a curiosity, or even a villain – an inscrutable seductress, a manipulating con artist, and a caterwauling fraud who hypnotised Lennon and broke up the greatest band in history”.
Source: Rosa Silverman/telegraph.co.uk
