Yoko Ono retrospective at MoMA shows just how talented she is

Yoko Ono has had to wait a while for her first retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), though not for want of trying.

In 1971, several New York newspapers ran ads for a "one-woman show" that Ono was presenting at the museum. But anyone who came down to West 53rd Street would have seen no show at all, only a man with a sandwich board outside the museum entrance. Ono, the man explained, had released a number of flies in the sculpture garden; they could be in the museum now, or anywhere in Manhattan. In the catalogue she published, she appeared in the garden with a large glass bottle full of the insects, but on inspection it's clear that even the release of the flies never happened. It was just a photomontage.

Who knows whether Ono ever thought she would really get the retrospective she faked in 1971. But now, at the age of 82, her first (or is it second?) one-woman show really has opened at the MoMA, and it goes a long way to re-evaluating one of the most misunderstood artists of the past 60 years.

Her massive fame, and maybe her heal-the-world rhetoric too, has obscured the groundbreaking contributions she made to the art of the 1960s and beyond. At last, the art world has come round. This show - finely curated by Christophe Cherix, the museum's head of drawings and prints, and Klaus Biesenbach, its chief curator at large - is no guerilla occupation. It is a belated and jubilant rectification of the historical record, and a victory lap for an artist laughed at for too long.

Much of the early work on display here is drawn from a major gift MoMA received in 2009 of artworks, correspondence and documentation related to Fluxus, an impish and fluid movement with which Ono was partially associated. The Fluxus artists, notably George Brecht and George Maciunas, favoured performances and publications with a prankish tone. Ono's art was pithier, and dreamier.