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.
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.
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| 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.
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| 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 |
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| Map of Level 4 |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| John Philip Falter, Muddy Walk Home, 1950 |
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| 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.
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| Comics galleries |
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Bill Mauldin, Stop worrying about Star Wars…, 1985
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The Reagan administration's missile defense system was nicknamed "Star Wars," after Lucas' film franchise.
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| 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.
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| Installation view of Robert Colescott's George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook, 1975 |
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| Norman Lewis, Street Scene, 1941 |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Norman Saunders, Transfer to the Hearse Ship, 1951 |
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| 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.
Comments
LACMA's Geffen Galleries by far has this one beat in terms of an interesting aesthetic experience while moving through the interior of the museum.
They're a criss-cross checkerboard format, which is a look that seemed popular decades ago (eg, a 1980s-era restaurant?). It's a variation of how the color of avocado green is evocative of the 1970s.
Not sure if the open-grid ceiling is due to Yansong's own preferences ("hipster urbanist") and not due to Lucas favoring that option over a more traditional one. When it comes to the floor, however, just the opposite may be true.
I can easily see a variety of people making an effort to visit the Lucas versus a traditional art museum---other than the Louvre (since that's to Paris what Disney World is to Orlando).
I always remember being near the front door of the now-demolished Ahmanson Gallery and a young kid wailing at his father that he didn't want to visit LACMA.
As for that museum compared with the Lucas, I'm more skeptical of the professionalism of LACMA. They have less excuse for not crossing all their T's and dotting their I's versus a museum based on "narrative" and modern-day pop culture.
Even from a technical standpoint, the Lucas sounds like it will open in a more user-friendly (or professional) condition than the Geffen. The Lucas will have 3 separate areas for food and refreshment whereas LACMA's Geffen opened with just one small Erehwon. Not to mention the Lucas already has 2 functioning theaters.
In the Baroque, at least, there was a hierarchy of painting genres. History painting was inarguably the most prestigious. Well, what is history but narrative?
The frames for these works from the 1990s are like Beaux-Arts-baroque simulacrum, sort of in a Disney-anish way:
https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2026/09/15.-Courtesy-Lucas-Museum-of-Narrative-Art.-Photo-by-Paul-Salveson-1024x683.jpg