Lucas Preview

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art held a media preview. Some photos and first reactions—

Lucas as thought experiment. Imagine a museum where you can see Margaret Keane, Grandma Moses, Charles Addams, Robert Crumb, H. R. Giger, Paul Cadmus, and Banksy—plus anime, Mad magazine, Star Wars robots, and Mexican calendar pin-ups—much of it art that the gatekeepers tell us is bad taste (and they're not exactly wrong). The Lucas invites you to be a flâneur of the world's unruly visual culture and to invent your own means of appreciation.

"Star Wars in Motion" gallery

4th Level gallery view. At left is an icon of the dogs-playing-poker genre, Cassius Marcellus Coolidge’s A Pat Hand, 1894

Lucas v. Geffen. It's hard to deny a similarity of vibe. Both are curvy and horizontal, set above the cityscape. The Lucas' main collection installation, on the 4th Level, spans 82,000 sf, compared to 110,000 sf for the Geffen. Both buildings have a randomish layout of theme galleries. If anything the Lucas is more random, lacking the Geffen's oceans. It's easy to get lost, though the gallery maps are easier to read than the Geffen's. 

The Geffen has more and better city views. The Lucas doesn't hang art near windows; its galleries are boring white cubes with perfectly lighted art. (Maybe that's not such a bad thing.)

The Lucas' sci-fi elevators are amazingly fast, and the curvy wood benches are comfortable.

Glass elevators

Lobby bench

The Lucas has two theaters. The one named for former USC film chair and maven of montage Slavko Vorkapich shows experiment film

Interior of Robert Flaherty Theater. Photo: Hufton+Crow

"Narrative art." Almost every major museum except the Guggenheim was founded to show art-that-tells-a-story. Thus it isn't really the storytelling that sets the Lucas apart. The term "people's art," which they're using lately, is better. The Lucas shows art that was intended to speak to just about everyone, not just those with an intellectual interest in art. For the most part, the Lucas features art made after the invention of photomechanical printing and the cinema. It collects magazine illustrations, advertising art, comic strips, comic books, graphic novels, children's book illustrations, and street art; concept art, animation cels, and props for movies, especially of the fantasy and science-fiction genre. 

You don't have to be fanperson to appreciate that this is an important part of our cultural history. It is also something that falls between the cracks of art museums, history museums, and research libraries. That's why the Lucas is not just another vanity museum. It's doing something fundamentally different.

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Dr. Eloesser, 1940

High art. Here's where it gets a little confusing. The Lucas collection also includes a smattering of high art collected by regular art museums. The collection's crown jewel is a Frida Kahlo self-portrait, one of the best. (But it's not especially narrative!) There is also Robert Colescott's George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware. Definitely narrative, it's an influential painting that still resonates with contemporary artists. There are a few Mediterranean antiquities; paintings by Lucas Cranach, Artemisia Gentileschi, Pissarro, Renoir, Cassatt, and Léger; drawings by van Gogh and Picasso. Not everything is first rate, but the Kahlo alone is a must-see for anyone interested in art.

Projected reproduction of a section of Trajan's Column

Fake art. The first-floor galleries consist largely of high-tech reproductions. You start with a walk-through simulation of the Altimira cave paintings and walk past facsimiles of the Venus of Willendorf, the Aztec Sun Stone, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescos, Raphael's The School of Athens, the Hagia Sophia, Rembrandt's The Night Watch, etc., etc. They mix and match technologies: some are backlit transparencies; some are projections; some are sculptural copies; some are 3D and/or animated. The Willendorf Venus sways for your 21st-century gaze.

I was prepared to hate this, but I couldn't. Think of it as a walk-through Art History 101 slideshow. The reproductions are more detailed than in a coffee table book, much less a screen. The selection is more eclectic than a standard survey. There are truly interesting juxtapositions as well a handful of noncanonical artists. It will make the most informed visitor think. So will the replicas of replicas (fakes-squared). An image of Michelango's David reproduces not the original marble but a plaster copy at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Moses is a marble copy from Forest Lawn cemetery. 

Scattered among the replicas are a few real objects from the Lucas collection. Velázquez's Las Meninas is represented by John Singer Sargent's suave copy, which the Lucas owns.

Michelangelo's David at second remove: This is a 2026 high-res dimensional image of the Victoria & Albert Museum's c. 1856 plaster copy of Michelangelo's c. 1501–04 marble

Map of Level 4

Cover art for Mad magazine by Frank Kelly Freas, Richard Williams, Jack Davis, Norman Theodore Mingo, and Mort Drucker

Low art. The mainstay of the collection is low art, as some might call it, and that's mainly on the 4th Level. A big part of the collection is original art made for printed magazine covers. There's Norman Rockwell, naturally, but he was just one of many in the mid-century illustration biz. I found plenty of the artists more interesting than Rockwell. 

Stevan Dohanos, Model Home, 1974

Two mid-century illustrators to watch are Stevan Dohanos and John Philip Falter. Dohanos has the Wes Anderson knack of using symmetry to highlight the absurdity of American life. Falter is poised between Regionalism and Minimalism. However dumb the joke he had to illustrate, the composition is interesting. 

John Philip Falter, Muddy Walk Home, 1950

Walt Kelly, "We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us",  1970

Comics. The suite of 4th-floor rooms covering comic art is a museum within the museum. The selection spans newspaper comics strips and comic books, political cartoons, and graphic novels.

Other museums of comics art have struggled to attract audiences and funding. Many have overestimated their cross-generation appeal (5-year-olds have little interest beyond current hit franchises). Lucas is betting that Star Wars and Frida will get people in the door. 

Comics galleries

Bill Mauldin, Stop worrying about Star Wars…, 1985

The Reagan administration's missile defense system was nicknamed "Star Wars," after Lucas' film franchise.

Normal Rockwell, The Problem We All Live With, 1963-64. Norman Rockwell Museum

Black and white. George is White, and Mellody is Black. African-American culture is an important subtext of the collection. Mellody Hobson is a collector of contemporary Black art, and the Lucas Museum has made a number of major purchases, including the Colescott George Washington Carver (auctioned for $15.3 million in 2021) and a 37,000-piece archive of Black American film history in 2020. There are paintings by Archibald Motley, Jr., Norman Lewis (an early figurative painting), Ernie Barnes, Yinka Shonibare, and Kadir Nelson. 

Installation view of Robert Colescott's George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook, 1975

Norman Lewis, Street Scene, 1941

Curt Swan, Superman's Girl Friend Lois Lane, 1970

There are uplifting views of Black life, but the installation doesn't shy away from discordant and even cringey notes. Consider Superman's 1970 take on cultural appropriation.

James Ormsbee Chapin, The Negro Boxer, 1928 

James Ormsbee Chapin was a White artist and illustrator who often depicted Black subjects. His Negro Boxer is an impassive brute, and his manager is a simpering villain. It's a sinister and interesting picture. Chapin was an influence for the Regionalists and grandfather to folk rock singer Harry Chapin.

Star Wars. Full disclosure: I hate Star Wars. But the 4th floor Star Wars installation was mesmerizing (and unsettling). The theme, "Star Wars in Motion," leaves room for many future iterations of Lucas' archives. 

A separate space is devoted to science fiction in magazines and film.

Norman Saunders, Transfer to the Hearse Ship, 1951

Banksy installation on 5th Level. Photo: Stefanie Keenan / Getty Images for Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

Muralism and Banksy. The 5th Level has a space devoted to murals, with work by Diego Rivera, Judy Baca, and JR. The surprise add is Bansky, who was commissioned to produce an assortment of works for the collection. 

Yinka Shonibare, Boy on Globe, 2012

Sculpture and Sculpture Garden. There are several notable contemporary sculptures indoors, by Yinka Shonibare and Takashi Murakami. Outside, Mia Lehrer's park landscape (much of it off limits for the preview) has an incipient sculpture garden. Like whole museum, this is a deliriously mixed bag. A 19th-century bronze by the once-well-known Antonin Mercié is juxtaposed with a brand-new bronze titled Princess Leia Frees Herself from Jabba the Hutt.

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens Sep. 22, 2026.

Sculpture garden with Mercié's David After the Combat. At left is Mark Newman and Giovanni Nakpil's Jabba the Hutt. Photo: Paul Salveson

Grandma Moses, The Trappers II, 1943

Al Hirschfeld, Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind, 1992

Margaret Keane, Children of Paris, 1961