Los Angeles has a striking new cultural landmark: the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, opening September 22 in Exposition Park after 17 years of planning. The $1 billion project houses a collection George Lucas has been assembling for five decades, and it is an unusually personal institution — of the roughly 1,200 works on display, all but six belong to Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson.
The building itself is a draw. Designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, the 300,000-square-foot structure has a distinctly spaceship-like silhouette — fitting, given the man behind it. Inside there's more than 100,000 square feet of galleries, two cinemas, a research library and a rooftop restaurant called the Skywalker Grill, inspired by Lucas's Skywalker Ranch and reportedly fine-tuned by the director himself; he spent over a year perfecting the Wagyu burger, according to Vanity Fair.
The collection is broader than Star Wars fans might expect, and stranger. Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Picasso hang in the same institution as Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth and Maxfield Parrish. Original Flash Gordon and Peanuts comic strips sit alongside manga, photography, murals and film production art. Lucas started collecting as a student, buying original comic art for about $30 a piece because it was all he could afford; the full collection now tops 40,000 works. As for Star Wars itself, superfans should temper expectations — it reportedly fills only around seven percent of the gallery space.
Lucas has framed the whole thing around feeling rather than scholarship. "Art is emotional; it's not intellectual," he told Vogue. That philosophy is what sets the museum apart from LA's established heavyweights: the Getty's Old Masters, LACMA's encyclopaedic range, the Broad's contemporary focus. This is one collector's taste, made public on an enormous scale — part philanthropy, part cabinet of curiosities, depending on your view.
For travellers, it adds a genuinely new reason to visit Exposition Park, which already holds the California Science Center and the Memorial Coliseum. Whether you come for a Kahlo, a comic strip or a Wagyu burger with a view, it's a rare museum where illustration, film and fine art are treated as equals — and where one man's obsessions are literally written above the door.
