Darth Vader alongside Picasso and Banksy: George Lucas’s ambitious museum opens in LA

Explaining the world through images. Humanity has been doing it for millennia: from cave paintings to photography, cinema, living-room television and the omnipresent screens of today. Over the past decades, if there is anyone who has known how to create emotion through images, that is George Lucas, 82, director, writer, producer and the creative mind behind phenomena that have shaped contemporary culture, such as the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises. And his eye for visual narratives has not been limited to film: for decades (funded by the lucrative returns of cinema), he has also devoted himself to art collecting, and possesses an immense collection of roughly 40,000 works that he has now decided to share with the world.

A kind of gleaming spaceship will house his collection, and the public will be able to view it starting this Tuesday, September 22, when the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens in Los Angeles. For now, about 1,200 works are on display across roughly 30 galleries, some devoted to individual artists but most organized thematically, prompting visitors to reflect on love, family, school, cinema, manga and photography. The museum sits in the deep south of Southern California, in Exposition Park, on what used to be a concrete parking lot next to the century-old Coliseum — which will host its third Olympic Games in 2028. There, the museum’s four legs, two wings and vast skylight, which took nearly a decade to build and almost ended up in Chicago, now gleam amid green lawns in a 4.5-hectare park planted with 300 trees including as pines and jacarandas. The building itself is over 300,000 square feet (including two theaters with a seating capacity for 600, cafés, restaurants, a library and study areas) and more than 100,000 square feet of gallery space.

Lucas wants to tell stories and he does not intend to do so in the traditional way of classical museums. That is evident even before you enter the building. The grounds feature a dozen sculptures; there are works by Fernando Botero, but there is also a Princess Leia and, in a time leap, one with Yoda and Grogu together. There are no scruples here. Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits sit alongside Beatrix Potter’s illustrations, the ships from the Star Wars saga, works by Andy Warhol, photos by Robert Capa and the original lion costume from The Wizard of Oz.

For a European visitor accustomed to great art galleries, the first impact is so strong it might even feel embarrassing. The first hall explains the origins of narrative: heroes, myths, the sacred. There are original pieces, such as a painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, but mixed in with them without any ceremony, there are copies and reproductions of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel and of Velázquez’s famous painting Las Meninas, (the original of which is in Madrid’s Prado Museum). “I think the Vatican is a great example,” says the museum’s CEO, the British-born Tracey Bates, in a conversation with EL PAÍS, “when you go to the Vatican and you are overwhelmed by it, it’s an incredible experience. You assume everybody gets to go, and one, they don’t, and I think we need to remember that. And two, you don’t see it close up. You see the glory of the Sistine Chapel, but you don’t see the story of the Sistine Chapel. So by it being so close to us, George is showing you the story. He’s telling us, Michelangelo is a renowned artist, but ultimately in his day he was an illustrator, so we should pay illustrators of our day the same credit.’”

Bates spoke with EL PAÍS with just four days to go before the opening, after several preview events for the press and local residents. With a hoarse voice and an evident blend of excitement and fatigue, she explained that she has been CEO since January — a role very similar to that of a director at a European museum — and nearly seven years as a consultant to Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson. The couple, in turn, have been shaping the museum idea for 20 years, with a collection he began assembling 60 years ago and of which, as he proudly notes in the museum catalog published by Taschen, he has never sold a single item.

That is why the ground floor functions as a kind of fully visual introduction to art history. Then comes the main course. The fourth floor unfolds roughly thirty galleries. Everything is mixed in there. Thus, the American painter Norman Rockwell has his own room with about 50 works, but his paintings also appear in theme-specific galleries about love, family and so on. There are galleries devoted to N. C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, Frank Frazetta and Thomas Hart Benton, and to illustrator Jessie Willcox Smith — all Americans from the early to mid-20th century — and their works are also interspersed elsewhere.

During the visit, for which the public should allow at least three hours, the cinema galleries stand out. The great star here is Star Wars; Indy is barely represented, with only a bronze statue. The sci-fi saga displays some original sketches and paintings as well as ships, costumes and props used in films across different decades. Just a few steps away are classic paintings by Alphonse Mucha and Diego Rivera, an original Tintín by Hergé, and even a comic-style work by Pablo Picasso. “We’re not bound by the same rules as a regular museum because we’ve built a museum, so the rules don’t exist, which has been really fun,” said Bates.

The works and galleries will rotate. Everything has been intentionally designed for that purpose. Equally deliberate is the absence of wall labels. “Yes, because we want to show the narrative in one frame, a story you can look at and understand. George was very conscious when working with the curatorial team that the art should speak,” she said. “You go to a museum, you start reading about a piece and instantly your opinion of what you’re looking at changes. We’ve been very intentional about not doing that here. We want the image and the story in that image to be what you see and what you engage with. hould you want further understanding, we have provided a free access digital guide. You just point your phone at the image and the context.”

The fifth and top floor, before the green rooftop, is dedicated to muralism. Lucas exhibits his murals here, which he describes in the catalog as “among the oldest forms of narrative art”; he also praises that “in a world saturated with fleeting digital images, murals offer a different tempo, require physical presence, anchor stories to specific places.” In addition to a large reproduction of Diego Rivera’s work (“it wouldn’t be right for us to take the Diego Rivera from Mexico. It remains where it remains, but that story doesn’t get told,” said Bates), there are also half a dozen original Banksy pieces, both from his walls and his stencils. Many of the works are politically charged, such as Crash and Depression: Mexican Deportation and Red Fear and McCarthyism, both by Mexican-American Judith F. Baca, the mind behind the collective work The Great Wall of Los Angeles.

Those who go one floor up — often closed for private events — can enjoy the building’s green terrace, its skylights, and look out over the large park. Designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, it was built with more than a thousand fiberglass panels by over 150 architects and engineers, using technology that did not exist until about a decade ago.

Adding to the Academy Museum and LACMA’s brand-new expansion, the Lucas Museum aims not only to be an artistic draw but the city’s cultural hub. That explains its handsome curved library with thousands of reference volumes on film and art, including 3,000 donated by the actor Steve Martin, as well as a dozen study rooms and two cinemas where documentaries and films will be shown, both about the works and creators on display and on a range of other programmed themes. It will also be a venue for events in a city where every evening is a celebration.

“This was built for 100 years plus it is a work of art in itself, a sculpture,” said Bates. “George has been building this for decades. I’ve had the pleasure of building it as a small cog for six and a half years. It will be thrilling to open the doors to the public. Because that is what a museum is for: for the people.”

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