After five tumultuous years, construction on the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is finally underway.
What Lucas is now building—ground was broken on March 14, and there is already an excavation so large that it looks like a massive earthwork if you view it from an airliner approaching Los Angeles International Airport—could not be more different from where he started out. The museum’s original incarnation, proposed for waterfront land within the Presidio national park, with views of the Golden Gate Bridge, was a grandiose, heavy-handed Beaux-Arts building that Lucas, who prides himself on his love of both art and architecture, insisted was the only thing appropriate for that site. That first version was called the Lucas Cultural Arts Museum, a title as awkward semantically as the building was architecturally. Its unveiling, in 2013, marked the beginning of a multi-year saga that would come to have nearly as many dramatic clashes as you’ll encounter in Lucas’s Star Wars, and almost none of the amiability of his American Graffiti.
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“Narrative art is an illegitimate child of art—you won’t see it in any major museum,” Lucas said to me when we talked last summer at the high-rise condominium that he, Hobson, and their young daughter share on Chicago’s Gold Coast. That isn’t entirely true, of course—narrative art, which is commonly defined as the use of image to tell a story, and can include everything from prehistoric cave paintings to carvings, tapestries, and murals, as well as commercial art, editorial and political cartooning, comics, poster art, and figurative art, is found in the collections of most comprehensive museums. By most measures you could describe a great post-Impressionist painting like Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte in the Art Institute of Chicago, just a few blocks down Michigan Avenue from where we were meeting, as a form of narrative art. Italian frescoes and the stained-glass windows in Gothic churches are narrative art, too; so is much photography.
Lucas likes to think of himself as an outsider in the world of art, much as he positions himself as an outsider in the movie industry, a director who has always gone his own way. The genesis of his museum, he said, sitting beside Hobson on a sofa beneath a Fernand Léger painting, came out of his desire “to put a stake in the ground for popular art, for San Francisco, and for anthropology. The original idea was that it would tell you the history of art from cave paintings to digital art.” At the same time, Lucas felt, it could be a record of Northern California’s contributions to filmmaking, which included not only his own company, Lucasfilm,....
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