Before the Doors Officially Open: A First Look Inside the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

Long before you set foot inside, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art announces itself as something unlike any museum Los Angeles has seen. Architect Ma Yansong’s design is pure science fiction made solid — a smooth, undulating white form that seems to hover rather than sit, as if a spacecraft had settled gently onto the lawns of Exposition Park and decided to stay. There isn’t a hard edge in sight. Every hallway, every gallery threshold, every sweep of the exterior skin bends into the next, so that walking through the building feels less like moving room to room than drifting along a single continuous curve. If you came expecting a boxy hall of white cubes, recalibrate: this is a museum that looks like it belongs on the cover of the very science fiction and fantasy art it partly celebrates.

The location only sharpens that effect. The Museum rises directly across from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and sits at the doorstep of USC, so the futuristic and the historic trade glances across the street. Inside, in a genuinely unusual move for a museum, actual windows — not just skylights — let you look out from the galleries onto the USC campus, the Coliseum’s rim, and the Museum’s own gardens below. Those gardens are worth wandering through in their own right: 13 verdant, landscaped acres carved out of dense urban Los Angeles, an almost startling amount of green space so close to downtown.

Inside, the curatorial philosophy is just as eclectic as the architecture. Don’t come expecting a greatest-hits survey of art history. Yes, there is a Picasso here, a Pissarro, a Van Gogh, a Renoir — but they share wall space, and equal billing, with artists most visitors will have never encountered before (certainly not in a museum setting). Almost nothing predates 1900, save for Winslow Homer and a small handful of others. There is plenty of David Hockney on offer in the voluminous gift shop, so I assume I missed that late genius’ work elsewhere in the Museum.

Old school art aficionados will be initially perturbed with the “lowbrow” art displayed, that has been dismissed for eons. Here, the curatorial mindset is that such “lowbrow” works in a conventional art-history context deserve the same reverence typically reserved for the old masters. Judging by our tour through the Lucas, I agree.

Norman Rockwell is probably the most recognizable name you’ll find here, and in this context his gift becomes newly legible: his ability to compress an entire narrative — a whole relationship, a whole moment of American life — into a single illustrated panel is genuinely remarkable when you slow down and actually study it, rather than glancing past it as “just” an old magazine cover. And a few galleries later, finding a rendering of Alfred E. Neuman — Mad magazine’s gap-toothed mascot — hanging within sight of a Picasso is the kind of juxtaposition that shouldn’t and wouldn’t work in a traditional. But it works fine here. It’s startling at first, and then, a beat later, deeply satisfying: proof the Museum means what it says about narrative art recognizing no hierarchy of taste.

Of course, there is also a healthy dose of Star Wars paraphernalia, for anyone whose inner geek needs feeding. Seeing Luke Skywalker’s actual landspeeder prop up close — dented, scuffed, visibly handled on a working set decades ago — lands as pure, uncomplicated nostalgia; the wear and tear is the point.

Given that a viable definition of “art” is “that which creates a pause for thought,” certainly the Lucas Museum complies.

The photography galleries may be the Museum’s quiet triumph. Richard Avedon’s portrait of The Beatles hangs with the kind of clarity and presence that stops foot traffic, and nearby — almost as a reward for lingering — is one of the six frames Iain Macmillan shot on Abbey Road the morning he produced what might be the most famous album cover in music history. Seeing the sequence of near-identical frames side by side makes plain just how much of that image’s power came down to a single, fleeting choice. The Museum also includes a tasty selection of Banksy, regardless of whether you exit through the gift shop.

Layout-wise, the Museum backs up its architectural promise. I can’t recall encountering a single hard corner anywhere inside; what stays with you afterward is long, flowing, curving sightlines pulling you from one gallery into the next, almost without your noticing the transition.

The Lucas Museum’s own language for its thesis: “Encompassing everything from prehistoric cave paintings to today’s screen art, the Lucas Museum explores and celebrates the power of visual storytelling to inspire individuals, give shape to beliefs and ideals, and forge community.” Having walked it, that reads less like marketing copy than an accurate description.

The inaugural exhibitions draw from the Museum’s founding collection of more than 40,000 works, including the Lucas Archives, gifted by the Museum’s founders — supplemented by additional pieces on loan. It’s an enormous foundation for a Museum just opening its doors, and on this early walkthrough, it already feels like enough material to fuel returning visits for years.

We want to come back soon to spend time in the lovely library and further explore the non-random eclectic collection. And I want to find that Hockney.

(photos by Joy Auerbach)