The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opened Sept. 22 in Los Angeles, a $1 billion project built around 1,300 original works and a huge Star Wars display that gives George Lucas something more ambitious than a tribute to his own films. The 300,000-square-foot building is now one of the city’s newest cultural landmarks, and it arrived with its creator sounding both proud and tired.
At a press preview Wednesday, Lucas and Mellody Hobson spoke for the first public look inside the museum, and Lucas said, “This one almost broke my will.” That line fit the scale of what opened: a museum that tries to treat narrative art as seriously as any old master collection while still giving fans the vehicles, costumes and production treasures that made Star Wars a global obsession.
The museum is not presented as a conventional Star Wars attraction. It is framed instead as a place for narrative art, with the main gallery anchored by that film universe and the ground floor opening with “the history of narrative art: Heroes, Myths, the Sacred.” That first exhibit leans heavily on screens showing high-resolution images of prehistoric paintings from Spain’s cave of Altamira, then moves through interiors, paintings, statuary and other works associated with the Louvre, the Vatican, Versailles, the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque and Pompeii.
That old-world approach is part of the surprise. The building may look like a spacecraft, and Lucas Museum leaders seem to prefer words like “unconventional” and “oppositional,” but the experience is not a high-tech spectacle built to overwhelm visitors. It is closer to a long argument for why mass-media illustrators and cartoonists from the 20th century deserve the same reverence usually reserved for the masters of art history.
That is where the museum’s real gamble sits. The Star Wars material will pull people in, but the curators are using it as an entry point, not the whole point. The unresolved question is how the 1,300 works are divided across the galleries, and which pieces are meant to carry the argument once visitors move past the familiar costumes and vehicles. For now, the opening gives Lucas a museum that is finally open, and a collection that insists narrative art belongs in the center of the room.
