George Lucas Opens Narrative Art Museum in LA — SkimNews
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- George Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson co-founded the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which opens this month in Exposition Park on an 11-acre site (formerly two parking lots) next to the Natural History Museum and L.A. Memorial Coliseum.
- The Lucas Museum spans a library, two movie theaters, 100,000 square feet of gallery space, and sculpted public parkland, and is described as a swooping twin-bodied megastructure 'white as the gown of Princess Leia.'
- The collection ranges from a full-size reproduction of Altamira's Paleolithic cave paintings to works by Frida Kahlo, Norman Rockwell's The Connoisseur, Robert Crumb's Book of Genesis, and a high-res photographic recreation of the Sistine Chapel — organized around American myths (work, family, sports) and single-artist galleries like Maxfield Parrish.
- LA Times critic Christopher Knight in 2017 dismissed narrative art as a 'made-up category' and the museum's definition ('visual art that tells a story') as a 'perfect tautology' — a critique the author of this piece largely waves off.
- Lucas, 82, has not directed a film since 2005's Revenge of the Sith; the museum's organizing principle, which he drew from Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces, represents his latest and most ambitious creative endeavor.
Why it matters: For the Los Angeles art establishment, Christopher Knight's 2017 LA Times dismissal of 'narrative art' as a tautology hangs over the museum's opening; the 100,000-square-foot, 11-acre site's deliberately populist scope — Rockwell to R. Crumb to Paleolithic reproductions — will test whether Knight's institutional critique or the museum's 'all-gatheringness' wins the curatorial argument.
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