Yoko Ono: the woman who broke up The Beatles or great feminist artist?

Misunderstood genius or pretentious charlatan? Revolutionary artist or (frankly terrible) singer? Almost six decades after she became globally (in)famous, it’s still hard to find a cultural figure more polarising than 90-year-old Yoko Ono. Her relationship with John Lennon is cited as the blueprint of the meddling girlfriend, ruining her partner’s (superior) art, her work often derided and used as a punchline: no one really wants to hear themselves described as “a bit of a Yoko”.

But Peter Jackson’s seven-hour Beatles documentary Get Back, released in 2021, started to unpick the myths surrounding Ono and the break-up of the world’s biggest band. Yes, she’s practically omnipresent as The Beatles are at work, but she hardly seems like an obstacle to their creative process; most of the time she’s knitting or reading the newspaper. Now a new exhibition at Tate Modern, the UK’s largest ever showcase of Ono’s work, will further challenge what we think we know about her when it opens this month. It’s all part of an overdue reappraisal, forcing us to ask: how much do we really know about Yoko Ono?  And is it time we started taking her work seriously?

Born in 1933, Ono had a privileged upbringing. Both her parents’ families had made their fortunes in banking, and her father’s high-flying job meant that Yoko