As the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art prepares for its September 22 opening in Los Angeles, yet another big media is reflecting on the realisation of this long-term dream of The Maker. The Hollywood Reporter has published a review examining the massive cultural institution built by George Lucas and Melody Hobson, calling it “billionaire filmmaker’s temple of narrative art“.
Describing the expansive new 11-acre Exposition Park campus as a unique reflection of its founder, the review notes that the institution “makes perfect sense under the intellectual and idiosyncratic terms of this oddball personal endeavor, a final-act provocation which only someone with f***-you money can realize at such colossal scale and scope.”
Featuring 100,000 square feet of exhibition space dedicated to the history of visual storytelling, the museum bridges classical illustration, comic art, fine art, and cinematic archives.
The museum is a clear extension of Lucas’ auteurism. He spent his film career not just world-building on screen but creating an ecosystem of institutions like Industrial Light & Magic, Skywalker Sound and Lucasfilm. Here, his Hollywood retirement project is what Wagner would have called a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, in which “narrative” is the organizing principle. In Lucas’ telling, its creation was analogous to the way a film is put together: Casting is the collection, scripting is the curation, editing is the installation, and architecture and landscaping are the production design. “It’s like making a movie — exactly the same thing,” Lucas explained to Vogue in May.
The Frazetta Girls were also on hand on press day.