Yoko Ono Auctions Lennon’s Art

Imagine.

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 - is off to Washington, D.C., after ending its run today in San Jose. 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 it 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.

Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.

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.

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 current 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 awhile 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 remixed 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.”

Like most interesting people - like her late husband - Ono is easily misunderstood, and not so easily explained.

She compares her husband to Matisse yet colorizes some of his prints. She deplores the linkage of price with quality, yet carefully watches the art-world economy and says it’s important to set the value of Lennon’s work. She calls herself a rebel, yet she’s one of the wealthiest people in Manhattan.

Of course it’s those sort of contradictions that always drove Lennon’s work. Even when he sang, “War is over,” he had to add, “if you want it.” Even when Paul bragged, “It’s getting better all the time,” it was John who had to interrupt with, “can’t get no worse.”

Great art and interesting people thrive on contradictions.

So Yoko Ono, avant-garde bohemian, now runs a multimillion-dollar business. Yoko Ono, the woman few Beatles fans wanted to marry John, is now entering her 15th year as his widow, a role she has assumed with dignity and grace.

She gives few interviews. She has written no memoirs. She hasn’t remarried, and although designer Sam Havadtoy has been a companion for years, there are no party pictures of them on the Hamptons, no mentions of them in the gossip columns. Like the widow of a slain king, or King, or Kennedy, she’s aware of her place in history.

Which isn’t to say the woman who co-wrote “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” is content with just being the martyr’s widow. Her days, she says, are “like a suitcase in which you can squeeze in a lot.

“It seems to be working. I’m wearing a lot of hats - I’m doing the business, and John’s art, I do my own work, and also I’m a mother, too - but most women are wearing many hats these days.”

She’s as proud as any mother of her children.

Sean, now grown up, is “taking a leave from Columbia because he realized he didn’t have enough time to do music. And he seems to be happy, and I’m very happy that he’s doing that. He played on my new album, ‘Rising,’ with his band.”

Of Julian, John’s eldest, she confesses “he’s in a very delicate position, because he’s loyal to his mother … and the world likes to portray me in the classic sort of stepmother role. But I never think of myself as a stepmother. Not a mother, either, because that’s not fair to his. I like to think of myself as a friend.” (Of her adult daughter, Kyoko - the product of a previous marriage, and lost decades ago during a custody fight and a parental abduction - Ono only says, very quietly, “I do have some communication with her. … I know that she’s alive.”)

The time set aside for the interview is ending. Ono has business to conduct and details to attend to. She’s leaving the country soon. When she’s back in Manhattan, she’ll go straight to the Dakota, as she has for years, and straight past the spot where Lennon was gunned down.

It has to be a constant, grisly reminder. Yet, she says, living somewhere else never occurred to her. “This was our home,” she says quietly. “This is our home, and for Sean all his memories of his father happened here. He’d be devastated if I ever left here.

“Now he’s independent and living in a loft by himself - he said, ‘Mommy, I’m 19; it’s time’ - but whenever he comes back here, he feels good. And if I’d left this place at the time, he would have been devastated.”

“I would too, you know,” she says after a moment. “Everything I touch is a reminder of John.”