What Is ‘Narrative Art’? The Lucas Museum Finally Shows Us Its Vision.

 

 

"To get the obvious question out of the way — is this just a museum of “Star Wars” stuff? — the answer is that Lucas’s cultural juggernaut of a film franchise makes up only about seven percent of the museum’s gallery space. That said, an enormous Naboo N-1 Starfighter does greet visitors in one of the lobbies. And fans can encounter Luke Skywalker’s landspeeder in the cinema gallery and a statue of Yoda atop a fountain in the gardens.

The rest of the museum’s content is largely 20th-century American art organized into broad categories like “family,” “work” and “sports.” There are Norman Rockwell scenes of everyday life; a Pikachu from Pokémon; art from the world of fantasy (“The Lord of the Rings” to Conan the Barbarian); and an entire gallery of graphic art and comic book images.

Also on display is a strip of “Alley Oop,” a comic about a time-traveling cave man; it’s the first artwork Lucas ever acquired. Lucas so reveres comic strips that the filmmaker once tried to make a version of the comic “Flash Gordon,” explained the senior curator, Ryan Linkof. But someone else got the rights, he said, so Lucas made “Star Wars.”"

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