The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opened to the public on Tuesday 22 September in Exposition Park, Los Angeles, to a sold-out crowd. Founded by the film-maker George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, the museum is housed in a building by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects. An invited opening celebration was held the Saturday before.
The opening arrives in the same autumn as Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, which is due to open its doors on 11 December. Both are museums with a signature architect, and both have been years in the making.
A building like a cloud
Ma Yansong worked with the firm Stantec on the building, which covers about 300,000 square feet over five storeys. Ma has described it as light and free as a cloud, or a dream, according to the museum. The landscape is by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA, and includes 11 acres of park and gardens and ten monumental outdoor sculptures.
Inside, there is more than 100,000 square feet of exhibition space in more than 30 galleries, as well as two theatres of 299 seats each. The museum’s chief executive is Tracey Bates.
The museum has not published a cost for the building in the sources read, so none is given here. The project was first planned for Chicago before moving to Los Angeles.
What narrative art means
The museum’s name needs a word of explanation. Narrative art is art that tells a story, whether it is a painting of a myth, a magazine illustration, a comic page, a photograph or a film. By collecting across these forms, the museum treats them as parts of one tradition rather than as high and low culture.
Lucas, speaking about popular illustration and comic art, has said that they deserve to be in a museum. Hobson, the co-founder, has said that this art belongs to everyone. Bates has said that every gallery, programme and corner of the museum was built with visitors in mind.
Van Gogh beside Star Wars
The inaugural displays include more than 1,300 works, from painting and illustration to photography, comics, murals and cinema. They also include the complete Lucas Archives, which cover the years from 1971 to 2012.
The artists named by the museum include Artemisia Gentileschi, Vincent van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, Jacob Lawrence, Gordon Parks, Robert Capa, Takashi Murakami, Charles Schulz and Beatrix Potter.
The opening displays are arranged in several parts:
- The History of Narrative Art: Heroes, Myths, The Sacred, the museum’s survey of the subject.
- Genre galleries devoted to fantasy, adventure, comics, manga, photography and murals.
- Star Wars in Motion, with vehicles, props and costumes from the first six films.
- An installation on the architecture of the building itself.
The Star Wars display draws on the first six films, which means the original and prequel trilogies, and gives Lucas’s best-known work a place among much older art. The mixture is the point. A visitor can pass from a Renaissance painter to a children’s book illustrator and a space-opera costume in a single afternoon, and the connections between them are part of what the museum offers.
A library for researchers
The research library holds more than 30,000 comic books, about 3,000 art books donated by Steve and Ann Martin and more than 2,900 volumes from the personal library of Joseph Campbell. Campbell, the scholar of myth, is closely associated with the idea of a hero’s journey, which gives his books a natural place in a museum devoted to stories.
Tickets and access
Adult tickets cost $25, and visitors aged 65 and over pay $21. Entry is free for under-18s, members, active-duty military and residents of the 90037 ZIP code.
Guests at the opening celebration, according to Spectrum News, included Oprah Winfrey and Mark Hamill.
Why it matters for collectors and travellers
For collectors, the museum is a signal. Illustration, comic art and film material have long been traded as separate categories, and a major museum placing them beside Van Gogh and Kahlo may change how they are valued and studied. Readers who follow the art market will want to watch how auction houses and galleries respond.
For travellers from the Gulf, Los Angeles now has a new reason to be on a US itinerary. The museum combines architecture, cinema and fine art, and its free-entry categories include residents of its own ZIP code.
With the Guggenheim arriving in Abu Dhabi in December, the autumn offers a rare comparison of two new museums with signature buildings and very different ideas of what belongs on their walls.
Sources: Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Spectrum News