George Lucas spends a billion dollars to win an argument, and the Lucas Museum finally opens (news).
After sixteen years, three cities, two humiliating civic rejections and roughly a billion dollars of his own money, George Lucas has finally found somewhere to put his stuff. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens to the public in Los Angeles on 22nd September, and yes, it is actually finished. The panels are on. The trees are planted. The restaurant is called the Skywalker Grill, because of course it is. Tickets went on sale over the summer and the website did not fall over, which is frankly more than most things with a Lucasfilm logo attached can claim.
The short version of the backstory is that a man who has spent fifty years being told by serious people that his work is not proper art has responded by constructing a three-hundred-thousand-square-foot building in which to make the counter-argument at volume. The long version involves San Francisco telling him no, Chicago telling him no rather more expensively, and Los Angeles finally saying yes in 2017 in the manner of a city that has never once refused a rich man with a vision.
It began at Crissy Field, where Lucas wanted to build on Presidio land and the Presidio Trust decided it would rather not, thank you. He decamped to Chicago, announced a site on the lakefront near Soldier Field, and promptly ran into Friends of the Parks, a nonprofit that filed a federal lawsuit arguing the lease effectively surrendered control of public trust land. Lucas walked away in June 2016 muttering about how the city he had chosen had chosen otherwise. Chicago got to keep a car park. Los Angeles got a billion-dollar museum. Somewhere in a filing cabinet there is a memo that ought to be framed.
Then came the delays, which arrived with the stately inevitability of a Special Edition. Originally slated for 2021, the opening slid to 2023 thanks to the pandemic, then to 2025, then to 2026. Lucas has now spent longer building this museum than he spent making the original trilogy, the prequels and the entire business of selling the company to Disney combined. The man does not release on schedule. We have known this since 1997.
What has actually landed in Exposition Park is a Ma Yansong design, built by MAD Architects with Stantec doing the executive-architect heavy lifting, and it looks unmistakably like a spaceship that has settled on South Los Angeles to refuel. Ma insists he was thinking about clouds. Nobody believes him, including, one suspects, Ma. The thing has no straight lines anywhere on its exterior, which is clad in 1,271 individually shaped fibreglass-reinforced polymer panels, each averaging eight feet by thirty-two, every one hand-finished so the curves read as a single continuous surface. A pair of steel arches span 185 feet to hold the whole mass up over a public plaza, and an elliptical oculus is punched through four storeys above your head so the sky can get a look in. It is either the most beautiful new building in California or a very expensive lozenge, and the critics will be arguing about that for a decade.
Inside are more than a hundred thousand square feet of galleries across thirty-odd rooms, showing about 1,300 works drawn from a personal collection of some forty thousand objects that Lucas has been quietly assembling for five decades. The pitch is “narrative art”, meaning any picture that tells a story, and on that basis you get Artemisia Gentileschi hanging in the same institution as Frank Frazetta, Frida Kahlo down the corridor from Robert Crumb, Norman Rockwell, Diego Rivera, Gordon Parks, Jack Kirby and Frank Miller. Christopher Knight of the LA Times has called narrative art a made-up category and predicted a monument to Hollywood kitsch. He may well be right about the category. He has also just described roughly ninety per cent of what this magazine has covered since 1991, so we shall take it as a compliment and move on.
The genuinely lovely bit, and the bit nobody will write about, is the research library, which is free to use and contains over thirty thousand comics, Joseph Campbell’s personal collection of 2,900 volumes, and three thousand art books donated by Steve Martin. There are two 299-seat cinemas, named for Robert Flaherty and Slavko Vorkapich rather than for anyone with a lightsabre. There is a thirteen-acre park by Studio-MLA with three hundred new native trees and ten monumental sculptures scattered through it, one of them a Botero, which is a sentence that should be read aloud slowly.
For the record, Star Wars accounts for about seven per cent of the exhibition space. Lucas has been at pains to point out that this is not a shrine to his own back catalogue, and the numbers back him up, though there is a fifth-floor mural gallery, a Star Wars in Motion cinema exhibit, and the complete Lucas archives from 1971 to 2012 sitting in the building like a reactor core. Nobody is fooled. Nobody minds.
Admission is twenty-five dollars for adults, twenty-one for the over-65s, free for anyone seventeen and under, free for serving military, free for EBT cardholders, and free for residents of the 90037 postcode the museum landed in, who get an LM37 pass good for themselves plus a guest and who were also handed their own community preview day on 13th September, nine days before anyone else was let in. That is a decent bit of neighbourliness from an institution that could easily have gone the other way. It shuts on Tuesdays. The opening night is being co-chaired by, among others, Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro, Greta Gerwig, Tom Cruise, Pharrell Williams and the chief executive of Nvidia, a guest list that tells you rather a lot about who runs Hollywood now.
It has not all been smooth. Founding director Sandra Jackson-Dumont and chief curator Pilar Tompkins Rivas both departed before the doors opened, with Tracey Bates now running the place as chief executive, and the phrase “creative differences” has been doing quiet laps of the trade press. Museums are hard. Museums built around one man’s taste, funded entirely by that man, are harder.
Still. A billionaire has taken a billion dollars and spent it on a free research library, thirty galleries in which Frazetta hangs down the hall from Gentileschi, and a public park in a part of Los Angeles that could use one, rather than on a superyacht with a smaller support superyacht trailing behind it. Whatever you think of the architecture, that is a scoreboard we can live with.
Just don’t ask him to re-edit it in twenty years.
