Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 231
March 21, 2014
Sarah Lucas, Peter Doig and Martin Parr – the week in art
Lucas will represent Britain at the 2015 Venice Biennale, plus Doig airs his earliest works and a Martin Parr pop-up restaurant opens its doors – all in your fave weekly art dispatch
Exhibition of the weekPeter Doig: Early Works
The admirable British painter revisits his early works in this disarming portrait of the artist as a young man.
• Michael Werner Gallery, London W1K, until 31 May.
Mirosław Bałka
Freud and dreams and a shot of the dark stuff – this is Bałka's first exhibition in London since his troubling Turbine Hall installation at Tate Modern. Here he takes inspiration from Freud's classic of modern thought, The Interpretation of Dreams.
• White Cube Mason's Yard, London SW1Y, from 21 March until 31 May and Freud Museum, London NW3, until 25 May.
Tania Kovats
The artist whose Tree is a permanent fixture at the Natural History Museum explores the power of the sea in works that include a collection of water from every ocean.
• Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh EH1, until 25 May.
Ian Kiaer
This survey of the provocative sculptor's work is called Tooth House, after a project by the modernist architect Frederick Kiesler to build a house like a tooth.
• Henry Moore Institute, Leeds LS1, until 22 June.
Discoveries: Art, Science and Exploration
This collection of wonders and works of art from Cambridge museums is a beguiling cabinet of curiosities set in one of London's richest and strangest buildings.
• Two Temple Place, London WC2R, until 27 April.
JMW Turner – Norham Castle, Sunrise (c1845)
This is one of the most radical and tantalising of Turner's later paintings, which seem to foresee not just impressionism but even abstract art. Its colours are hauntingly unresolved, its forms suggestive rather than finished, its light a white, blue and yellow beacon from beyond.
• Tate Britain, London SW1P.
That the world's first underwater museum is full of algae-encrusted VW Beetles and classical busts covered in psychedelic coral
That Sarah Lucas – she of two fried eggs and a kebab fame – has been chosen to represent Britain at the 2015 Venice Biennale
That there's a Martin Parr-themed popup restaurant
Why the new pound coin design is a nostalgia booster – and a crimebuster!
And finally ...There's still time to share your artworks of ruins!
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The 10 greatest works of art ever
From mysterious 30,000-year-old cave paintings to a 'cathedral of the mind' by Jackson Pollock, art critic Jonathan Jones names his favourite artworks of all time – and where in the world you can see them. What would make your top 10?
• The 10 weirdest artworks ever
• The 10 sexiest artworks ever
• The 10 most criminal artists ever
Leonardo expresses the human condition in a nutshell – indeed, his rendition of the womb resembles an opened horsechestnut casing. Inside is the beginning of us all laid bare. Five hundred years ago, this artist and scientist could portray the human mystery with a wonder that is not religious but biological he holds up humanity as a fact of nature. It is for me the most beautiful work of art in the world.
• Royal Collection, Windsor Castle
Caravaggio shows a murderous moment in a prison yard. The executioner has drawn a knife to sever the last tendons and skin of John the Baptist's neck. Someone watches this horrific moment from a barred window. All around is sepulchral gloom. Death and human cruelty are laid bare by this masterpiece, as its scale and shadow daunt and possess the mind.
• St John's Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta
You are not looking at Rembrandt. He is looking at you. The authority of genius and age gaze out of this autumnal masterpiece with a moral scrutiny that is terrifying. Rembrandt seems to see into the beholder's soul and perceive every failing. He is like God. He is the most serious artist of all, because he makes everyone who stands before him a supplicant in the court of truth.
• Kenwood House, London
Who painted these exquisitely lifelike portraits of animals? There was no such thing as writing in the ice age so nothing is known of the names, if they had names, of these early people. Cave artists may have been women; they may have been children. What is known is that Homo sapiens, our species of human, makes its mark with these paintings that are as beautiful and intelligent as anything created since.
• Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave, Ardèche, France
The art of Jackson Pollock is a modern mystery. How, from flinging paint on a canvas laid on the ground, did he create such beauty and inner structure? Like a solo by Charlie Parker or Jimi Hendrix, his freeform improvisations loop and lurch and yet achieve a profound unity. Pollock only held this together for a short period of brilliance. This painting is a cathedral of the mind.
• MoMA, New York
The king and queen stand where you are standing, in front of a gathering of courtiers. Velazquez looks from the portrait he is painting of the royal couple. The infanta and her retinue of maids (meninas) and dwarf entertainers are gathered before the monarch. In the distance, a minister or messenger is at the door. In a bright mirror, the royal reflection glows. This painting is a many-layered model of the world's strangeness.
• Prado, Madrid
When Picasso started to paint his protest at the bombing of Guernica, the ancient Basque capital, by Hitler's air force on behalf of Franco in the Spanish Civil War, he was at the height of his powers. Thirty years after painting his subversive modernist grenade of a picture Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, his cubist intelligence was now enriched by the mythology and poetry unleashed by the surrealist movement. He also looked back to such historical paintings as Raphael's Fire in the Borgo as he set down the greatest human statement of the 20th century.
• Reina Sofia, Madrid
Michelangelo's Prisoners, or Slaves, were begun for the tomb of Pope Julius II but never finished. In its entirety – including the Dying and Rebellious Slaves in the Louvre and the statue of Moses on the final, reduced version of the tomb eventually erected in Rome – this constitutes the greatest unfinished masterpiece in the world. Yet Michelangelo did not leave things unfinished out of laziness. It is an aesthetic choice. The tragic power of these prisoners as they struggle to emerge out of raw stone is an expression of the human condition that equals Shakespeare's Hamlet.
• Accademia Gallery, Florence
The long marble frieze, colossal broken statues of reclining gods, and frenzied carvings of centaurs fighting humans that Lord Elgin removed from the Athenian Acropolis two centuries ago are best known today as objects of controversy – which is sad, because we should be marvelling at their genius. Most of the best ancient Greek sculpture is only known through Roman copies. This is the greatest assembly anywhere of the real thing: the very art that created the idea of the "classic". Gaze on the lowing heifer that inspired Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn and the goddesses whose robes uncannily resemble pictures by Leonardo da Vinci. Artistically, beyond the squabbles, it doesn't get better than this.
• British Museum, London
The broken vision of Cezanne is a glittering array of glimpses and hesitations and reconsiderations. The intensity of his gaze and the severity of his mind as he attempts to see and somehow grasp the essence of the mountain before him is one of the most moving and revelatory struggles in the history of art. Out of it, very quickly, came cubism and abstraction. But even if Cezanne's researches had led nowhere, they would put him among the greatest artists.
• Philadelphia Museum of Art
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March 20, 2014
Peter Doig: Early Works review – 'A show all would-be artists should visit'
Michael Werner Gallery, London
In laying bare his first pieces, the British painter reveals how he bubbled over with excitement in his student days – and teaches a valuable lesson in how artists can find their signature style
It takes a special kind of courage for a famous artist to drag 40-year-old apprentice pieces out of the attic and make an exhibition of them. Yet that is exactly what the celebrated painter Peter Doig has done for his new show Early Works.
How early? Many of these paintings and drawings, Doig reveals as we contemplate a sketch of a car with Michelangelo's David as a hood ornament, were done when he was a student at St Martin's art college in London in the early 1980s. "It was a great time to be studying painting", he remembers, with the 1981 exhibition theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
March 19, 2014
A jester at the last supper? How Veronese became his era's Ai Weiwei
Called before the Inquisition to justify his jokey take on Christ's final meal, the great Italian painter was defiant. And thanks to a transcript, we have his pugnacious defence word for word
Veronese was one of the greatest painters ever, as the National Gallery's exhibition of this 16th-century artist makes joyously apparent – see my five-star review here. But he was also a hero of artistic freedom. Veronese was the Ai Weiwei of his time, a brave man who stood up to authority – and won.
Xavier Salomon, the curator of the National Gallery's superb exhibition, told the BBC that Veronese had a dull life dedicated to work. Well, up to a point. But what about the dramatic and well-documented episode when he was hauled up before the Inquisition and accused of disrespect for Christianity?
Veronese developed a unique line in large-scale – in fact, preposterously huge – and lavishly detailed altar paintings of biblical scenes in which Christ sits down to a meal. It does not seem to matter to Veronese which meal he is portraying. What he loves is the opportunity to show a diverse crowd of diners, waiters and entertainers enjoying a banquet. In reality he is portraying the high life of Venice, the city where he lived. In his epic and comic masterpiece The Wedding Feast at Cana in the Louvre, a host of finely dressed men and women eat, drink and flirt while Veronese portrays himself and Titian as musicians entertaining this glittering company.
An entertainer – that's how Veronese saw himself. Definitely not a preacher. But is it alright to turn religion into entertainment? The Inquisition, the Catholic bureau of investigation charged with suppressing heresy, did not think so. It summoned Veronese to appear on 18 July 1573 to answer some awkward questions. The hearing is perfectly preserved in a word-for-word official transcript: my translations come from Elizabeth Gilmore Holt's reproduction of it in her 1947 book A Documentary History of Art.
Typically, the inquisitor started by asking Veronese why he thought he had been summoned. He claimed he had no idea.
"Can you imagine it?" asked the inquisitor.
"I can well imagine."
A priest, Veronese said, had asked him to replace a dog in his new painting of the last supper with a Magdalene. He refused.
This painting, he explained, was about 17 ft tall and 39 ft wide. So were there other figures in this huge scene, asked the Inquisitor? Veronese described some of them, but it soon became clear the Inquisitor had studied the picture in detail and already knew exactly what details offended him – asking, for example, "What is the significance of the man whose nose is bleeding?"
"I intended to represent a man whose nose was bleeding because of some accident."
You can see why the Church was uneasy. A nosebleed at the Last Supper? That's not in any Gospel.
It got worse.
"And that man dressed as a buffoon with a parrot on his wrist – for what purpose did you paint him?"
Veronese replied that he put the jester in this tragic valedictory supper with Christ "for ornament".
Even one of the supposedly grief-stricken disciples, he admitted, "has a toothpick and cleans his teeth".
Veronese was explicitly accused of profanity. He replied with two defences. For one thing, he pointed out, the great Michelangelo had filled the Sistine chapel with "nudes". And anyway, all artists deserve complete freedom:
"We painters take the same licence the poets and the jesters take ..."
He went home and merely changed the title of his controversial painting. By calling it The Feast in the House of Levi instead of The Last Supper he sidestepped the Inquisition in the most contemptuous way possible. He did not change the actual picture.
And he got away with it. Why? Because he was in Venice. This proudly independent republic always resisted the power of the pope. If Rome could rule Venetian minds it might also rule Venetian politics. Venice was a "libertine" city of free thought and free love and Veronese was its perfect artist.
Veronese's painting The Feast in the House of Levi can be seen today in the Accademia Galleries in Venice. It is full of jokes, gaudy jesters, drinkers and fashionable people – oh, and Christ is there too, somewhere in the carnival crowd.
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March 18, 2014
Say cheese: could you stomach Martin Parr's pop-up restaurant?
Banquets inspired by the photographer's grim images of British cuisine are being served up at a London eatery. I'd rather drink a cup of tea in a greasy caff
This week a pop-up restaurant in London is serving up cuisine inspired by the photography of Martin Parr.
That's right, Martin Parr – the terrifyingly honest photographer of Britain shorn of all pretensions of 21st-century cool. His 1995 book British Food might offer a glimpse of the kind of food that awaits diners at Say Cheese – and over five courses too.
Seaside donuts, strings of sausages, fish fingers, baked beans and mini sugar packets are all shown in lurid bright colours in Parr's food photographs of unreconstructed British grub.
I can't face a five-course banquet like that – and anyway, I come from seaside Wales. If I want a Martin Parr meal I don't need a postmodern metro version, I can just go to Rhyl and get the original for a lot less money. I have never forgotten a cup of tea in a Rhyl caff that arrived before me with a solid layer of grey, greasy scum floating on top. How Martin Parr is that?
So what other artists might inspire unlikely cultural cuisine? A pop-up beer hall inspired by the Weimar artist George Grosz might be fun, with German beer and sausages straight out of his grotesque images of Berlin in the 1920s. Or what about a chance to enjoy the drunken feast in William Hogarth's 18th-century painting An Election Entertainment? Diners to this pop-up could booze and scoff oysters until they pass out.
Another idea is an Edward Hopper diner. It would be just like a real New York diner, except that everyone would sit in existential solitude like the people in Hopper's painting Nighthawks.
All this reminds me of Andy Warhol's vision for a chain of restaurants called Andymats. He saw the Andymat as a place where you could dine alone and get served from a machine. In fact, it seems he was prophesying Yo! Sushi.
Yet none of these alternatives is quite as disgusting as the food photography of Martin Parr. Today it's fashionable to defend British food but the truth is that because we had the industrial revolution before anyone else, we lost touch with fresh natural ingredients some time in the 19th century and a lot of British food is as grim as Parr pictures it. I like fish and chips but I recently went to Bilbao and tasted cod cooked the Basque way – what a massive indictment of British "cuisine", based as it is on the same Atlantic fish we have access to. So why don't we have inky squid and cod in pepper sauce?
Martin Parr's vision of British food is a real challenge to national pride and the Parr pop-up restaurant should be quite an experience, if you can stomach it.
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March 17, 2014
Why artists should Carry On Screaming Fenella Fielding's name
Martin Firrell's video artwork, metaFenella, sees the 86-year-old actor imparting her wisdom. Why has it taken so long for the art world to celebrate this subversive Carry On star?
Would you take life advice from a woman who smokes? From her body, I mean. In Martin Firrell's online artwork metaFenella, you can sample the wisdom of actor Fenella Fielding who, in the 1966 film Carry On Screaming!, uttered the immortal line "Do you mind if I smoke?" At which moment a cloud of the stuff wafted from her sultry form.
I'd like to see more art about the Carry On films. Or even a wider acknowledgement of them as art in their own right.
Fenella Fielding, now in her 80s, has of course done things besides Carry On. She pioneered women's standup comedy, was a legendary Hedda Gabler on stage and her unmistakable voice has enriched such classic television programmes as The Prisoner.
But who can forget her double act with Kenneth Williams as the gothic brother and sister who cast their victims in a gooey stuff like fish and chip shop batter? "Frying tonight!" as Williams cries.
It's surprising that Fielding has only now been taken up by the art world. In her own way, she is like an Andy Warhol superstar. The Carry On films were made at the same time that Warhol was making his "underground" films in New York and the similarities don't stop there. theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
March 14, 2014
Veronese review - 'a carnivalesque appetite for all human life'
The grandeur and detail of Renaissance Venice provides as exciting an encounter with great art as you can ask for
How can an art gallery do justice to a painter who specialised in decorating the walls and ceilings of palaces, and in painting epic banquets so big they dwarf the rooms they are in?
What it must do is what the National Gallery has done for its greatest exhibition since its Leonardo da Vinci blockbuster a few years ago. A whole suite of the gallery's most beautiful rooms, usually filled by its permanent collection, have been cleared so Paolo Veronese's palatial paintings can have the space and light they deserve. The result is an utter joy. Veronese is an artist of abundant, irrepressible life. He is as expansive and theatrical as Shakespeare, who was 24 when the artist died in 1588.
Shakespeare was fascinated by Venice, a city of merchants, money and sex. But where he imagined it from afar, Veronese was right there, painting the beauties, aristocrats and pet monkeys close up.
The architecture and waterways of Venice shimmer through his paintings in glimpses of impossible cityscapes. Yet amid all the grandeur, his touching eye for human detail gives every scene – religious, mythological or plain erotic – a pathos and realism that only a handful of other artists have matched.
In a portrait of Iseppo da Porta and his son Leonida, the big strong hands of the father dwarf his son's hands as they touch. This kind of intimacy is not just in Veronese's portraits. As the war god Mars sits next to his naked lover Venus, the look on his dark, bearded warrior's face is unbearably tender.
Everywhere you look, layer upon layer of technical brilliance dazzles the eye. The jewels of an unknown woman in his famous painting La Bella Nani (lent from the Louvre) are painted in free swirls with flecks of white and gold set off by her blue dress. This painterly freedom and boldness is sheer genius at play.
Veronese's early painting The Supper at Emmaus is a dazzling example of his carnivalesque appetite for all human life.
Instead of the weighty, holy moment other artists might make of this Biblical scene, Veronese surrounds Christ with tough looking waiters and gaudily dressed diners. Emmaus looks fun, the way he paints it.
This lack of respect for religious decorum was later to get him into a spot of bother with the Inquisition.
His relish for the things of this world is also apparent in the exhibition's cabinet of love, where nudes and their admirers cavort and gaze at each other. Veronese paints flesh, faces, clothes and sky with miraculous delicacy, energy and chromatic splendour. This exhibition captures the very essence of him. It is as exciting an encounter with great art as you can ask for.
Rating: 5/5
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Veronese, Yoko Ono and the Serpentine Pavilion – the week in art
Veronese saves his skin from the Inquisition, the 81-year-old artist gives an exclusive interview ahead of her Guggenheim retrospective, and Chilean to design Serpentine Pavilion
Exhibition of the weekVeronese
When the Inquisition asked this sensual, social artist why he put so many drunkards and eccentrics into supposedly religious paintings he replied that artists deserve the same license as jesters. Veronese art is a carnival of life. This big survey should be a treat.
• National Gallery, London WC2N from 19 March until 15 June.
William Kent
This show examines one of the great architects of Georgian Britain, a polymath who created a new design ethic for a nation redefining itself.
• V&A, London SW7 from 22 March until 13 July.
Ellen Gallagher
New works in a variety of media by a pungent original.
• Hauser and Wirth, London W1S from 14 March until 3 May.
Wildlife Photographer of the Year
The very last chance to see this entrancing hymn to the natural world by photographers of all ages, snapping wildlife all over the planet.
• Natural History Museum, London SW7 until 23 March.
Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize
This popular celebration of photography and people is on tour from London's National Portrait Gallery.
• Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh EH2 until 26 May.
Titian – The Death of Actaeon (c1559 - 75)
The art of Veronese is part of the great age of Venetian painting whose presiding genius was Titian. Here, Titian imagines the horrible death of a voyeur: Actaeon accidentally saw the goddess Diana bathing and turns him into a stag so his own hunting dogs will devour him. The painting's violence and magic are made moving by an atmosphere of autumnal woods and rainy, gloomy colours.
• National Gallery, London WC2N
Steve Rose meets the avant-garde artist who bared her buttocks for Yoko Ono, filmed herself having sex when movies still couldn't say the word 'vagina', and made art out of meat long before Lady Gaga.
What we learned this weekYoko Ono considers conceptual art 'more expressive' than painting.
Chilean architect Smiljan Radic will design 2014 Serpentine Pavilion.
The Italians give the Germans a run for their money making woodcuts.
This year's Venice Biennale will 'be about architecture, not architects'.
Some of the artists in Munich's 1937 Degenerate Art weren't Jewish.
Adelaide tells the story of Australian art better than Royal Academy.
Einstein sent cards of his famous tongue portrait to friends.
Not all of you know your David Bailey from your David Hockney!
And finally ...Follow us on Twitter.
Share your artworks about ruins here.
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The 10 weirdest artworks ever
From sexy heels trussed and presented on a silver platter to Damien Hirst's formaldehyde shark, a tour through some of the strangest, most shocking surrealist art around
• The 10 most criminal artists ever
• The 10 sexiest artworks ever
• The 10 most shocking performance artworks ever
The surrealist movement in the 1920s and 30s believed that revolutions begin in dreams. Taking their inspiration partly from the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, they set out to create art from the unconscious. Dalí's Lobster Telephone is an iconic example of one of their most haunting discoveries, the "surrealist object", a ready-made thing or combination of things that speaks in some obsessive, inexplicable way to the artist. For Dalí, telephones are sinister messengers from "Beyond" while the lobster is sexual. With a lobster telephone, you can dial up a dream.
Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991)The surrealist object lives on, as a shark preserved in formaldehyde and appearing to swim relentlessly through the white space of an art gallery. There is only one word for Damien Hirst's toothy tiger shark, which gapes as it appears to glide towards you, as this natural history specimen is given the illusion of movement by the refractive perspectives of a glass vitrine: surreal. With its gradual wrinkling and decay, the shark has become even more bizarrely surrealist.
The Colossus of Constantine (4th century)The gigantic remains of a statue of Emperor Constantine, preserved in Rome's Capitoline Museum, have haunted the dreams of artists for centuries. In the 18th century, Henry Fuseli portrayed an artist "overwhelmed" by the strange spectacle of Constantine's enormous marble hand. In the 1950s, artist Robert Rauschenberg photographed his companion Cy Twombly standing by the same gargantuan relics. The sheer scale of this statue dwarfs reason; its fragments are utterly surreal.
Joan Miró, Object (1936)The Catalan visionary Joan Miró created a quintessential surrealist object when he joined together a pirate's bizarre hoard, including a parrot, a woman's stockinged leg, a map, a hat and a swinging ball. His constellation of dream images found in everyday life creates a sense of magic and mystery that opens the mind.
Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram (1955-59)When Robert Rauschenberg found a stuffed goat while trawling New York dumps and antique shops, he could hardly ignore the sexual charge of its phallic horns and mythological associations: In ancient Greece goat-legged satyrs chased nymphs across the hillsides; in Christian art the devil himself is goatish. Rausenberg completed this work by thrusting the goat through a tyre, as in some cosmic sex act. The result is one of the strangest and most memorable of all readymades.
Méret Oppenheim, My Nurse (1936)The surrealist Méret Oppenheim had an eye for presenting suggestive stuff from the world around us. She famously, for instance, covered a cup and saucer with fur to create an image of oral pleasure. Sex and food are similarly mingled in My Nurse. Oppenheim presents a pair of white high-heeled shoes, trussed and presented on a silver platter like a delicious meal for a fetishist.
Giorgio de Chirico, The Song of Love (1914)Arguably, the first surrealist objects appeared in the paintings of melancholy modern spaces and enigmatic relics that Giorgio de Chirico was making on the eve of the first world war. In The Song of Love, a rubber glove hangs incongruously next to a marble head. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire – who coined the word surreal – recorded de Chirico going out and buying this very rubber glove. In other words, it is not just a painted fantasy but also a surreal object from the real world.
Max Klinger, A Glove (1881-1898)In this astonishing series of late 19th-century prints a man – the artist – sees that a woman has dropped her glove. In a series of increasingly outlandish fantasies he pours his passion and longing for the unknown woman into an intense relationship with her glove. Klinger's masterpiece proves that many surrealist ideas, including its cult of obsessional objects, were anticipated in the age of fin de siècle decadence.
Robert Mapplethorpe, Louise Bourgeois (1982)In this beguiling photograph, the suggestively smiling Louis Bourgeois holds a truly surreal object, one of her provocatively carnal sculptures whose phallic form is richly emphasised by Mapplethorpe's black and white photograph. In her long creative life, Bourgeois directly linked the age of surrealism with our own time. This picture conveys the surreal charge of the woman and her works.
Marcel Duchamp, In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915)Before the surrealists were possessed by objects they found at Paris flea markets, Marcel Duchamp "selected" his readymades. The difference between a Duchampian readymade and a surrealist object is the difference between Duchamp's sly irony and Dalí's ecstatic obsessions. Duchamp's objects, however, evoke the same irrational forces that were to loom large in surrealism. This 1915 readymade consists of a snow shovel and a title that warns of imminent injury: Whose arm is about to be broken? Is it mine? This shovel is a humorous portent.
• The 10 most criminal artists ever
• The 10 sexiest artworks ever
• The 10 most shocking performance artworks ever
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March 13, 2014
Yoko Ono show at Guggenheim shines light on pioneering conceptual artist
Bilbao exhibition of installations, music and films demonstrates avant-gardiste's true talents, her reach and influence
'The ladder John had to climb up was very high," recalls Yoko Ono as we chat about one of her most famous works. It is called Ceiling Painting or Yes Painting, and it is one of the classics of conceptual art that fill her retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. It consists of a stepladder leading up to a steel-framed panel and a dangling magnifying glass.
When John Lennon climbed up Ono's ladder at the swinging London gallery Indica in 1966, there were more steps, but the word written above his head was the same as in this version: a "yes" so tiny you need the magnifying glass to read it.
The smallness of the yes and the difficulty of reaching it reflected her pain at the time, Ono says. A relationship had just come to an end and she had a vision of a journey into the heights, "like a cathedral", to be rewarded by some kind of hope, some affirmation "on high".
As it happened, her hopeful artwork was to change her life. The most serious Beatle heard about the amazing artist who had shown up in London, went along for a private viewing and climbed that ladder to read the tiny word. The author of I Am The Walrus and Strawberry Fields recognised a kindred spirit.
So the work is best known nowadays among readers of Beatles biographies for its part in one of the great love stories of modern times. Yet Yoko Ono is much more than her fame.
She has lived in the most lurid and cruel of pop culture spotlights, reviled as the black-clad avant-gardiste who "broke up the Beatles", mocked along with Lennon for supposedly naive peace-mongering, and brutally widowed by gun violence.
Now her time has come. The Yes Painting is not here as a piece of Lennonabilia but as one of a hugely impressive array of installations, performance documents, "instructions", music and films that leave no doubt of a true original's influence on the art of this century.
Is there any contemporary art style she did not pioneer? At times this feels like a retrospective of Turner Prize winners: here's a film of a fly crawling on a woman's naked thigh that might be misattributed to Douglas Gordon or Damien Hirst; a cinematic celebration of bottoms Martin Creed might be proud of, a chair wrapped in desiccated fabric that is as poetic as any sculpture by Rachel Whiteread – all made by Ono more that forty years ago.
In person, she's charming, authoritative and mysterious. She wears dark glasses and a hat indoors – but any first impression of hauteur is undercut by the way she keeps humorously lowering and raising her shades on her nose as she enthusiastically expounds her philosophy. Nor does she seem aware of my orders to stay clear of her personal life in this exclusive interview – which is just as well as it would be nonsensical. Art and life are the same thing for Ono. Her work is acutely, often shockingly personal. Conceptual art, she tells me, is "more expressive" than painting: a striking claim that her art proves true – at least when she's providing the concepts.
In 1964 a young woman knelt down before an audience in Tokyo and placed a pair of scissors on the ground in front of her. Members of the audience were invited to come forward, one by one, and cut off pieces of her clothing. In films and photographs of Cut Piece, as it is called, Ono maintains a passive deferential pose and expression as women and, more disturbingly, men cut off more and more of her clothing until she's kneeling in her underwear.
It is surely one of the most powerful of all feminist artworks. But did she think of it, I want to know, as a feminist statement back in 1964? Ono's intelligence flashes. "All powerful art has many layers of drama," she explains. "I was originally thinking of the Buddha and how he gave everything up." That ascetic surrender, she thought then, is what life is like for women, and she conceived Cut Piece as an "acceptance" of that reality. So it's not angry? "No, it's not angry."
Yet violence and pain streak through her art, for all its Buddhist acceptance. When her relationship with her boyfriend Tony Cox was breaking up in London in the late 1960s, she woke up one morning to find he had vanished from their all-white flat.
She responded by bisecting a roomful of their stuff – a chair, a framed painting, a case, a shelf unit, a kettle, a teapot, even shoes. It was not just spite: it was art. Her installation Half-a-Room is one of the most powerful moments in the retrospective. It's like a haunting relic of a tragicomic play, a set for a Samuel Becket monologue or an image from a sad song.
When it was shown at the Lisson Gallery in 1967, it looked to a Britain highly sceptical about conceptual art (to put it mildly) like ultra-hippie craziness. Today it is another Ono creation that seems like the prototype for about a hundred recent works of art.
She called that Lisson Gallery show the Half-a-Wind show, and her retrospective is named after it. What did it mean? Like the half-destroyed room at its heart, the title spoke of loss, absence, incompleteness. "We are all just half a person", she says. In fact, at that moment she was in the process of finding her other half: Lennon helped with the exhibition.
You can't really get away from him at the Guggenheim, because their love was founded on artistic collaboration and he was her as she was him, artistically, in the late 60s and 70s.
Their relationship did not start with physical passion, she explains. Instead it began as artistic collaboration: when Cynthia Lennon finally caught them together, they had been up all night making art. Lennon's face hovers in grainy colour in their film Smile, one of the shared endeavours that sealed their love. There's a little work of art called Box of Smile: you look inside to see your reflection (you provide the smile). In an uncomfortable vintage David Frost interview, the art lovers present Frost with a version of this piece as they try to explain conceptual art to a television studio audience that looks like its average age is 100.
For all the bile unleashed on Ono in 1960s Britain, she got away with one stunt no recent artist has rivalled. "Amazing, isn't it?" she says happily, remembering how in 1967 the police let her wrap one of the lions in Trafalgar Square in a huge piece of cloth. Photographs of the happening look far more subversive, somehow, than today's routinised and respectable artworks on the square's fourth plinth.
The word "revolution" comes as readily to her lips today as it did when she and Lennon put up a poster in Times Square saying War Is Over (If You Want It). The counterculture she did so much to shape, and that she sees today in the internet, "is a revolution but there is no bloodshed; art quietly changed the world."
With such a sense of mission, she never worried about pleasing the public. Back then, "most people didn't want to know and I wasn't about to explain about it. My art was different from what was considered as art. My idea was that maybe one day 50 years later or 100 years later people might discover it."
At 81, she has lived to see that day. Her interactive feminist conceptual art, her films and installations, now look like beacons of what art is now and will be in years to come.
To visit this moving and beautiful show is to see what Lennon saw in her – a visionary he looked up to, an artist whose imagination and intelligence, he insisted, set him free and showed him a better life. He was right and the cynics who satirised her were wrong.
ArtYoko OnoJohn LennonJonathan Jonestheguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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