Yoko Ono

She married Toshi Ichiyanagi in 1956. Sadly, the marriage was short-lived and the two separated in 1962, after which she was admitted in a mental hospital briefly for clinical depression.

She was released from the mental hospital by Anthony Cox, whom she married in June 1963. The couple had a daughter, Kyoko Chan Cox, in August 1963. This marriage too did not work and they divorced in 1969.

Her third marriage to founder member of Beatles rock band, John Lennon, (in March 1969), saw a series of break-ups and patch-ups after he got involved with his personal assistant, May Pang.

Yoko Ono was born on February 18, 1933, in Tokyo, as the eldest of three children, in a wealthy banking family to Eisuke Ono and Isoko Yasuda Ono.

Her father was transferred to San Francisco two weeks before her birth and hence, was able to meet her only when the family shifted to the US in 1935.

The family returned back to Japan in 1937, where she secured admission in the Gakushuin School. In 1940, the family relocated to New York City and back to Hanoi next year, where she attended Keimei Gakuen primary school.

She went to Scarsdale, New York, in 1951 with her family and enrolled in Sarah Lawrence College, but left midway in 1956.

Her loft events held on Chamber Streets caught the attention of leading New York’s avant-garde artists, which won her an opportunity to work with leading musicians, like Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, George Maciunas and Nam June Paik.

She went to Tokyo to live with her parents after her first marriage failed, where she met American jazz musician and filmmaker Anthony Cox and returned to New York with her new family, to take up performance art.

She performed her first seminal act, ‘Cut Piece’ in Tokyo, which was well-received. She repeated her acts in Manhattan and London, in 1965 and 1966 respectively, which made her a sensation in the art world.

In 1966, she made an artistic ad film ‘Bottoms’ after 365 friends and volunteers agreed to get their naked buttocks photographed, as part of an experiment with performance art.

She met John Lennon at the preview of her art exhibition in London in 1966, with whom she collaborated on several musical and artistic projects.

Her ‘Cut Piece’ act at the Sogetsu Art Center, Tokyo, in 1964, where she invited the viewers to cut off pieces from her clothing using scissors, became a cult piece of conceptual and performance art.

A paradigm of her abstract art, the ‘Grapefruit’ book, released in 1964, illustrated numerous weird situations to be completed by the reader. Its sequel ‘Acorn’ was released in 2013.

While honeymooning in Amsterdam in 1969, she used her publicity for holding ‘Bed-Ins for Peace’ campaign as a public protest against the Vietnam War. Her extended campaign in Montreal resulted in the single ‘Give Peace a Chance’.