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The newly opened 300,000-square-foot building is a sleek, futuristic vision of sweeping polymer-clad concrete and glass that hovers beside the University of Southern California campus in Los Angeles. Yes, this is the museum you’re looking for. The ambitious architecture is certainly appropriate for an institution founded by Star Wars creator George Lucas and his wife, the high-flying business executive Mellody Hobson, and bankrolled to the tune of a reported $1 billion.
If the Lucas name on the outside leads visitors to assume the inside is full of spaceships too, they’ll be half-right. At the opening “Star Wars in Motion” exhibition, fans will get the opportunity to pose with vehicles including Luke Skywalker’s Landspeeder and Anakin’s Podracer, but Lucas’ ambition is something far grander than simply a place to store his old props. His museum sets out to tell the story of narrative art throughout human history, from cave paintings to comic books, and to highlight the common thread of myth-making that connects it all.
The result is a sometimes disorientating mixture of high and low culture. This is surely the only place in the world where Frida Kahlo faces off against Batman, with a 1940 self-portrait by the Mexican artist on show across a corridor from a Lindy Hemming-designed Batsuit from The Dark Knight. There’s an early Van Gogh and a Picasso sketch, but there’s also Charles Schulz’s original Peanuts illustrations, Cassius Marcellus Coolidge’s dogs playing poker and a whole gallery dedicated to Frank Frazetta, whose work was originally intended to adorn the covers of fantasy paperbacks but now looks right at home on museum walls.
During a press conference, Lucas explained his belief that the artists whose works surround us in everyday life deserve to be elevated to the level of old masters. That’s why I wanted to build this.” I’m used to doing the impossible… but this one almost broke my will. It has been, in Lucas’ words, a “long haul” to make the museum a reality.
Originally planned for San Francisco, and then Chicago, the project was forced to change location in part because Lucas refused to compromise on his vision. In the end, he ended up just across the road from USC, where the 82-year-old was once a film student. I don’t like to do things that people think can be done.
I’m fascinated by doing things that people say can’t be done. I’m used to doing the impossible… but this one almost broke my will.” Some critics have already turned their noses up, claiming that “narrative art” is a made-up category, and arguing that the museum needs to do more to explain and contextualize the work it is presenting. Sitting in the museum’s wood-lined, horseshoe-shaped library, CEO Tracey Bates tells me that the decision to let the art speak for itself was “very intentional”.
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