Hyldest til John Lennon (Homage to John Lennon), Odense

Hyldest til John Lennon (Homage to John Lennon) is a sculpture by Danish artist Susanne Ussing, made in 1981, the year after Lennon was killed. It stands by the Amfiscenen open-air stage at Brandts Klædefabrik in central Odense. No likeness of Lennon: a figure holds a holed plate, after a Yoko Ono postcard, above an anti-war column.

A tribute without Lennon's face

The figure on top is the upper body of a woman with one arm stretched out, holding a square plate with a hole in the middle. The Om Odense local encyclopedia identifies her as Yoko Ono and notes her beret, a military touch it reads as a deliberate clash with the message below.

By the same encyclopedia's description, that message is on the stone column: "War is over if you want it", repeated four times, with a peace dove at the base. TV 2 Fyn explains the plate: it is modelled on a postcard by Yoko Ono with a hole in the middle, captioned in the corner as a hole to see the sky through, and the hole stands for peace. Om Odense dates Ono's idea to 1966.

Ussing, who lived from 1940 to 1998, trained as an architect as well as working as an artist and ceramicist.

From Strøget to Brandts

Ussing made the piece in 1981 with two other sculptures for an exhibition called Rockens Billeder (Images of Rock). For several years afterwards it stood outside Jørgen Nørgaard's clothing shop on Strøget in Copenhagen, moved between positions in front of the shop. In 1990 it travelled to Odense when Brandts Klædefabrik showed Rockens Billeder, and it stayed. Nørgaard and Ussing formally gave it to Odense Municipality in 1992.

Older Danish summaries seem to contradict each other on the exhibition, one tying it to 1981 and the other to 1990. TV 2 Fyn's account explains why: the work was made for Rockens Billeder in 1981 and came to Brandts when the museum hosted the same show in 1990.

The plate that went missing

In September 2023 Mads Nørgaard, son of the donor, who died in 2020, learned that the aluminium plate had vanished from the figure's hand. Without it, the raised arm looked uncomfortably like a Nazi salute. Nobody could say what had happened to the plate.

He contacted Brandts. Rikke From Larsen, the area manager there, tracked down Ussing's husband, Carsten Hoff, who still had the original measurements. That meant a copy in black oxidised aluminium could be made. The new plate was mounted at a ceremony attended by Nørgaard and Hoff, which TV 2 Fyn reported on 11 January 2024.