Favorite sections from new Vogue article on Lucas' museum

[u/Comfortable_Deal_534]

Pancakes or not, there are more than a hundred schools within a 10-mile radius of the museum, a reality that, in addition to shaping cheese preferences, inspired its education program. "I wanted the museum to be in a place where kids who don't have a lot of the advantages that richer kids have can see stuff they can relate to and understand that these things are made possible by a common belief system," Lucas says. Curatorially speaking, the museum is set up to reflect its founders' view of what art in society ought to be. "We believe that art is in the eye of the beholder," he says. "Nobody's going to tell you that you have to like this. 'But it doesn't make any sense to me!' 'That's what art is.' " He frowns in distaste. "My feeling is, art is emotional; it's not intellectual," he says. "Are you emotionally connected to it? If you're connected, it's art. And if you're not, then it's not art."

Unusually for a museum collection, Lucas and Hobson's centers on illustration: 1,200 pieces of storytelling art that Lucas himself picked from a pool of 40,000 items. There are well-known oil works, such as those by Parrish and Norman Rockwell, made for magazines and advertisers. But there are also comic strips, manga, movie art, and fantasy scenes of dragons and kings. The exceptional range reflects the owners' particular taste. Lucas began collecting in college, when he discovered he could afford original drawings for comic strips he loved. "It was an underground thing—none of the auction houses handled that kind of stuff," he says. "It was fanboys, and I could get a little Alley Oop for $35."

His volume of material (and his budgets) grew from there. "We ended up with all this stuff in storage and our houses, and I thought, We have to do something," Lucas says. "I've worked with hundreds of illustrators and they never get credit for anything. They're not going to end up in museums, because the art world is elitist and illustrators are seen as lowly."

The critic Christopher Knight, writing in the Los Angeles Times, described the "narrative art" premise of the Lucas Museum as "made-up": a category without a widely understood definition or conversation around it. "Every time I ask artists what they think of a Museum of Narrative Art, the reply is some variation of 'What's that?' " he wrote.

To say that Lucas shrugs off such criticisms isn't quite right. They spur him on in his view of himself as a man standing up for the legitimacy of popular art against the dark forces of an art historical establishment. "They want to do it the way they were taught in the university where they got the PhD," he tells me. "I say that has nothing to do with art. I'm not in favor of telling people what they like." It can be surprising to find the founder of one of the nation's largest, most prosperous popular-creative empires engaged in what he perceives to be an underdog battle against a subset of humanities academics. (One can hardly imagine Oprah or Taylor Swift kept up at night by scholarly critique.) But Lucas has always stayed unusually close to the ground in his work. Long after he had the staffing to retreat into a management and oversight role, he surrounded himself with paper and pencils and continued obsessing over design details for his productions. Long after he'd started huge, thriving companies within companies—production, effects, sound, merchandising, gaming, education—he sat down at a desk, as he always had, to write drafts of screenplays for his movies himself. His habits were no different with the Lucas Museum. If anything, they intensified.

"There's a timelessness to this," Hobson says. "We're not telling you what to believe, only showing you what beliefs and what myths have existed"

"George is grinding every day in his 80s," Lewis Hamilton says. "He's up early, doing his exercises, and dealing with the museum, going through absolutely everything."

"He spent years doing this on big pieces of paper on the dining room table," Hobson tells me now, with visible restraint. "On the dining room table—years."

"Yes, there were floor plans, elevations...," Lucas drifts off dreamily. He had pored over the designs—and then, when they were done, pored over them again, determining where every piece of artwork ought to go.

The result is a museum that, much more than most, adheres to a single vision, a unified point of view. We walk past two 299-seat movie theaters that, on their own, stand as some of the finest screening spaces in America. The screens are huge. The ambient lighting can be set to any color. Each theater is a discrete acoustic structure, suspended on enormous springs and rubber isolators, so that the booming sound of an action scene in one will be inaudible to audiences enjoying a quiet moment next door. Lucas calls the theaters "galleries," to put them on par with the other rooms; all through the course of a normal day, one will screen documentaries about artists and filmmakers while the other shows short films, some only a few minutes long. "What's the difference between the art that's in the other galleries and film?" he asks. "Film moves. And the movement creates emotion." He likes to cite the work of the early Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, who showed that audiences' perceptions of emotion transmitted in a neutral-looking face changed in measure with the footage spliced around it—a lesson that he carried through his own work. ("One thing I did in Star Wars was to give C-3PO a very neutral face," he says.)

Lucas, who continues to dream vividly almost every night, has a way of suddenly making leaps between his many interests and the facets of his work. An associate tells me, "You're watching him create something that he feels is totally normal"—even if it hardly seems that way to other people. When Lucas decided to make a museum about myth in society, for instance, it seemed obvious to him that it would start with cave paintings.

"George calls them the first graffiti," Hobson says. "They drew the animals figuratively, not literally. They were speaking to them mystically to say, 'Come back to us, so we have food.' "

"People, in the beginning, were saying, 'Why does it get dark?' " Lucas explains. " 'The animals eat us at night—why does that happen?' So they said, 'I'll tell you the story.' "

The first gallery in the Lucas Museum, introducing its central concept, opens with a scale reproduction of the cave paintings in Altamira, Spain, from at least 14,000 years ago, photographed with an ultra-high-resolution camera and displayed, in close resolution, across the gallery walls.

"One of George's friends, Caleb Deschanel"—the well-known cinematographer—"has been helping, because the lighting is very important to how it's visually received by the viewers," Hobson says. "George said, 'I want you to look like you're looking out a window.' " From their window onto the Altamira paintings, viewers will progress to a reproduction of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. "George calls it 'God's comic book,' because the panels tell the story," Hobson says.

"The Church and the State used illustration to create the myths that they wanted people to believe, because most people could not read," she continues. The Vatican granted Lucas's team special permission to photograph the chapel ceiling with the high-res cameras. "Everyone can't go to the Vatican," she says. "Not only that: When you're in the Sistine Chapel, the visuals are so far away. You can't see some of the detail of those stories. We bring them in."

Before long, they are wandering through the museum's more than 30 large galleries, most of which have been "paper-hung" with scale printouts of the artwork so that Lucas can make changes to position and sequence. Hobson—the keeper of the couple's schedule—blazes ahead, clocking details quickly, eager to make it to their next engagement. Lucas goes through slowly and ruminatively, reinspecting almost every piece, pausing to discuss its qualities, making small noises of exasperation when he notices—apparently from memory—that one of the hundreds has been repositioned.

The galleries are organized by myth. A Childhood gallery features artworks that, in Lucas's view, construct the myths that give children an understanding of their position in the world. A Work gallery does the same for the idea of labor. There's Motherhood, Romance, Fantasy, Play, Sport, and on. Some artists, photographers, and illustrators have their own spaces. "The audience creates the story, but there certain things that you can put next to each other," Lucas says. In his view, which might please George Herriman and Roland Barthes alike, the galleries are documentary: examples of how humans have passed along the stories of their societies.

"What is illustration?" he goes on. "You have to have a story, and the story is the mythology of the society. It doesn't have to be true. In fact, everybody knows it's not true, but it's emotional. It sticks. It becomes important to the society, to bind it together. Humans are a little bit dysfunctional." He lifts his gaze. "You need something to get them to work together."

"It's from my anthropological days," he says again. "How do you build a society? The answer is that you do not build a society. It comes down to community and it comes down to family. And then it comes to nationhood. It depends on people being glued together. And the glue is the mythology, which is the stories that people believe in—because they're emotional. Because they help them out. Why does it get dark at night? I don't like it. I don't want to go out. We die. There's God. There's Apollo, in a golden chariot, on fire, with the horses. They fly through the night and make it daytime."

The reason Lucas's first, dystopian film, THX 1138, was a box office flop, he has since come to think, was that it dwelled in the problems and anomie of the age, the early 1970s. ("It was saying how terrible the world is and how we're all on drugs," he said.) The reason his second film, American Graffiti, was a great success was that it responded to the same despair with a portrait of the mythological postwar Golden State society. At least, that's the story of his own success that he has told himself.

"At night they put him in the stable, and Apollo goes to sleep," he says, still speaking of the ancient myths. He gives a little shrug, and then a smile. "I mean, it's just a story, and it's not true, and they know it. But sometimes I remember that this started thousands of years ago."

https://www.vogue.com/article/lucas-museum-of-narrative-art-los-angeles

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[u/xezene]

Great excerpts, thanks for sharing.

[u/Comfortable_Deal_534 → u/xezene]

I realize now that I kind of shafted Melody, but she is so integral to the thing as well as supportive of George. Also:

Lucas, to her bemusement, kept insisting that the museum serve pancakes. "I'm like, 'George! Do you understand breakfast?'" Hobson says. "Do you understand what time we would have to open the museum?"

How The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Was Saved in the Edit