George Lucas Says Opening Lucas Museum ‘Almost Broke My Will’: ‘It’s Taken So Long to Get Here’ — SkimNews
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- George Lucas previewed the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles on Wednesday, saying the 17-year effort "almost broke my will" but reflecting his contrarian streak: "I'm fascinated by doing things that people say can't be done."
- The 300,000-square-foot spaceship-shaped museum next to the L.A. Memorial Coliseum contains more than 30 galleries housing Lucas's narrative-art collection, including Norman Rockwell paintings and works by Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Maxfield Parrish, and Frank Frazetta.
- A Star Wars gallery displays life-sized props including General Grievous's wheel bike from "Revenge of the Sith," Darth Vader's costume, Mace Windu's costume from "The Phantom Menace," Anakin's airspeeder, and Princess Leia alongside an Empire Strikes Back Cloud City illustration.
- The collection extends well beyond Star Wars to a Batman stunt costume from Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight films, an Indiana Jones statue, an original Cowardly Lion costume from 1939's "The Wizard of Oz," and Conan the Barbarian art by Sanjulian.
- Lucas framed narrative art as the museum's guiding concept: "A picture is very powerful, and the stories are very powerful, and you combine them together, and those two elements create a society."
- The museum is designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects with Stansec, with landscape architecture by Mia Lehrer, and opens to the public September 22.
- Lucas and co-founder Mellody Hobson credited the museum staff as "a big advantage" in finally bringing the project to fruition.
Why it matters: The 300,000-square-foot Lucas Museum, opening September 22 with more than 30 galleries, permanently consolidates one of the largest private narrative-art collections in the United States under a single roof in Los Angeles — pairing Renaissance-era works and Norman Rockwell with Star Wars props, making illustrators and pop-culture iconography co-equal institutional priorities for the first time.
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