Yoko Ono, Music of the Mind review: An exhibition that says it’s time to accept her as a significant artist

Avant-garde genius or pretentious charlatan? At 90 years of age, the divisive Japanese artist has been given a major London retrospective that thrillingly captures her extraordinary contribution to contemporary art

Ono with ‘Half-A-Room’, 1967 from ‘Half-A-Wind Show’, Lisson Gallery, London, 1967 (Clay Perry)

Nearly six decades into her often vexed relationship with the British public, Yoko Ono remains a baffling figure. Let’s not even start on the question of whether the Japanese avant-garde artist who married John Lennon did, in fact, “break up The Beatles”. Many – if not most – of the potentially large audience for Tate Modern’s new retrospective will still be unclear as to whether Ono is a genuinely significant artist or a pretentious charlatan. Is she a wide-eyed utopian as she presents herself, or a slightly sinister, manipulative figure? This thought-provoking show goes a lot further towards answering these questions than I expected.

The opening exhibit seems to confirm the popular expectation that Ono’s art will be as hard-going as her much-mocked howling/singing. Lighting Piece (1962) is an endlessly repeated film of a match being struck and going out in slow motion, relating to a four-hour performance in which Ono attempted to “stretch the imagination” of the audience. If it feels at this point that it’s the attention span rather than imagination that will be stretched, don’t give up quite yet.

A banker’s daughter born in Tokyo in 1933, Ono grew up in Tokyo and moved to New York City in 1952 to join her family, where she fell effortlessly on her feet in the middle of one of the most fertile artistic scenes of the 20th century. Evocative photographs from the time show mega-figures such as composer John Cage and artist Robert Rauschenberg roped into her eccentric performances.