FEATURE:
The ‘Yes’ Painting
IN THIS PHOTO: Yoko Ono and John Lennon captured together at their apartment in The Dakota building in Manhattan, New York City on 8th December, 1980 (just five hours before Lennon was killed)/PHOTO CREDIT: Annie Leibovitz
7th November, 1966: When John Lennon Met Yoko Ono
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NEXT year is…
quite a big one for fans of The Beatles. You can debate when The Beatles was formed, though I think it was the moment when Paul McCartney met John Lennon at the Peter's Church Hall fete in Woolton on 6th July, 1957. Next summer, we mark seventy years of this seismic moment. You feel McCartney and Lennon would have met regardless, but it was this magical meeting and discovery at a fete that began this songwriting partnership. I can understand that John Lennon meeting Yoko Ono was not happy for everyone. He was married to Cynthia Lennon when he entered the Indica Gallery in London and his life changed forever. Before spotlighting sixty years since John Lennon and Yoko Ono met and would then fall in love, it is worth thinking about Ono. The world owes her a massive apology for the misogyny and hate she received. How people said she broke up The Beatles. She didn’t. She was this incredible force of good for John Lennon. An amazing artist in her own right, she is still recording and active at the age of ninety-three. I wonder if she ever thinks back to 7th November, 1966. This was at a time when The Beatles were massive. They had sort of wound down touring by the end of 1966. Revolver came out earlier in the year. You do feel for Cynthia Lennon and how hard it was. Though you can tell that John Lennon and Yoko Ono were just right for each other. She was so important to him. Opened his mind and made him a better person. Even now, we do not give Ono credit and love for what she did in terms of Lennon’s music. How amazing she is. In Sam Mendes’s four Beatles film that will come out in 2028, Anna Sawai will portray Yoko Ono. Harris Dickinson plays John Lennon. I hope that Ono is portrayed affectionately and her story is told. That she is not just a minor character or portrayed as someone who was meddling and disruptive.
I think that is the impression that many people have. However, one fateful day in November 1966, John Lennon walked into the Indica Gallery. Lennon met Ono ahead of her solo exhibition, Unfinished Paintings and Object. I think about Lennon encountered by the gallery co-owner John Dunbar. Lennon climbed a ladder, looked through the magnifying glass, and read the word ‘YES’. I am not sure if this was the moment that Lennon knew that Yoko Ono was someone he wanted to spend his life with. It was definitely an eye-opening experience. Lennon said of Yoko Ono: “I’d never met a woman I considered as intelligent as me. That sounds big-headed, but every woman I met was either a dolly-chick, or a sort of screwed-up intellectual chick. And of course, in the field I was in, I didn’t meet many intellectual people anyway. I always had this dream of meeting an artist, an artist girl who would be like me. And I thought it was a myth, but then I met Yoko and that was it”. This article takes us inside a fateful and incredible meeting that changed the lives of John Lennon and Yoko Ono:
“John Lennon met Yoko Ono at her 1966 art exhibit Unfinished Paintings and Objects, at London's Indica Gallery. She was an avant-garde artist, and he was the most famous pop star in the world. Lennon previewed the show the night before its opening, and Yoko later claimed she didn't know who he nor the Beatles were—which seems unlikely, although it is likely that she didn't care. One piece at the exhibit, Apple, was just a real apple on a plexiglass stand. Lennon picked the apple up and took a bite out of it. Ono later recalled: "He just grabbed it and bit it and looked at me like 'There!' I was so furious, I didn't know what to say. How dare this person mess around with my work?" Lennon said of the incident, "I thought it was fantastic—I got her work immediately...it was two hundred quid to watch the fresh apple decompose" (Lennon Remembers: The Full Rolling Stone Interviews from 1970).
Another piece, Ceiling Painting/Yes Painting, was a ladder leading up to a picture frame on the ceiling, and a magnifying glass hanging on a metal chain. Within the frame, in tiny print, was the single word YES. Lennon described being impressed with the positive message: "I climbed up and got a look in this spyglass on the top of the ladder... you feel like a fool... and it just said, 'Yes.' Now, at the time, all the avant-garde was smash the piano with a hammer and break the sculpture and anti-, anti-, anti-. It was all boring negative crap" (Playboy Interview with David Sheff, September 1980).
There was also a blank white canvas on the wall with a bucket of nails and a hammer beside it, entitled Painting to Hammer a Nail. Lennon asked if he could hammer a nail in, but Yoko said no because the show wasn't opening until the next day. The gallery owner told her to let Lennon do it because he was a millionaire and might buy it. When Yoko finally agreed he could hammer a nail in for five shillings, John replied, "Well, I'll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in." Lennon later reflected: "And that's when we really met. That's when we locked eyes and she got it and I got it and, as they say in all the interviews we do, the rest is history" (Playboy, 1980)”.
It was not like their love story necessarily began on 7th November, 1966. The second meeting was on 22nd November, 1966, at the Robert Fraser Gallery, on 69 Duke Street, London. That was at an exhibition by American sculptor, Claes Oldenburg. Lennon arrived with Paul McCsartney. Lennon recalls how shy and nervous he was. So it took a while for that ice to be broken. The cultural differences and language barriers. They came from different worlds in a way. However, it is clear that Yoko Ono definitely stirred something in John Lennon. You can feel her brilliance affecting his work with The Beatles and his solo material. Though not everything was great – their earliest collaborative albums are pretty inaccessible and there were moments of vitriol in songs, especially one aimed at Paul McCartney (How Do You Sleep?), that don’t paint them in a good light -, but it was the start of something beautiful. They married and were together until Lennon’s death in 1980. Ono was with him when he was shot by Mark Chapman in New York. Howe horrifying it would have been to witness someone she had been with for fourteen years to be taken away. We do need to start acknowledging how important Yoko Ono was to John Lennon and many sides of his career. His activism. Bringing out a more experimental side. An intellectual and spiritual match, Ono helped him transition from the madness and messiness of Beatles break-up to becoming this solo artist and family man. Far from being someone who broke up The Beatles, she offered Lennon this stability and love at one of the worst moments in his life. Though Lennon was not competently transformed and rehabilitated – in terms of some of his choices, comments and musical decisions -, Ono’s presence and love was invaluable and transformative. I do think about that first meeting in 1966 and how it changed things. Maybe not as instant as Lennon approaching songwriting different and Yoko Ono being instrumental. Though she definitely affected many of his songs after 1966. There are events in the history of The Beatles that are hugely important and impactful. 1957 when John Lennon and Paul McCartney met. I do feel John Lennon meeting Yoko Ono for the first time as important as anything. In terms of their connection and how connected they were right away. It is so clear that Yoko Ono influenced John Lennon’s life…
FOR the better.