The Lucas Museum Doesn’t Have a Narrative

If a picture is worth a thousand words, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles has decided it’s not worth writing a single one.

Nearly two decades in the making and costing more than $1 billion, the long-awaited Lucas Museum is finally ready to make its debut, with founding member previews starting next week and its public opening on September 22. The two scrapped plans in different cities (first Chicago, then San Francisco) and the eight years spent building it in LA have certainly added to the hype surrounding the country’s newest museum.

In a promotional video for the museum, cofounder George Lucas says he has always had a problem with the mainstream art world’s rigid delineations between what is and isn’t art. It’s a noble cause, and one that many would now agree with. The past decade has seen profound changes in the art world, with scholars, curators, and critics working to rewrite an art historical canon that has, since the formalization of art history as a discipline in 18th-century Europe, been predicated on hierarchies of artistic media and artists and a neat succession of one movement giving way to another. In the process, innumerable artists and countless approaches have been pushed to the margins, including some of the work on view at the Lucas, particularly illustration.

But you don’t get the sense that the Lucas is making any of these arguments as you walk through its galleries, most of which are on the fourth floor. I started my visit in the gallery dedicated to Norman Rockwell, as good a place as any, given that George Lucas has collected his work in depth for decades and that Rockwell section sets the tone for what’s to come.

The breadth of his Rockwell holdings is quite astounding, extending well beyond this dedicated section. A masterpiece like Shuffleton’s Barbershop (1950), with its tightly cropped view into the titular space at night, still dazzles. It’s no wonder Lucas spent somewhere between $20 million and $30 million to acquire it before it went to auction, courtesy of the Berkshire Art Museum. Elsewhere are beguiling works like The Gossips (1948), Horseshoe Forging Contest (1940), and The Connoisseur (1962).

Insights into Rockwell’s working process and influence also abound. One wall pairs The Runaway (1958), depicting a young white boy sitting in a diner next to a police officer, with its preparatory sketch alongside Richard Williams’s The Militarization of the Police Department—Deadly Force (2014–15). The latter work updates Rockwell’s composition: a Black boy with a backpack now sits beside a police officer in riot gear, while the diner attendant, who appears to broker peace in Rockwell’s scene, eyes the cop with suspicion. A similar approach is taken with Triple Self-Portrait (1960), though the original is housed at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Massachusetts. The Lucas has instead commissioned a bronze version of the painting for reasons that aren’t entirely clear—perhaps as a selfie opportunity, given the mirror depicted in the work.

But what is immediately apparent is the lack of didactics anywhere in the museum. The argument here, as confirmed by the museum, is that looking should be privileged. At an art museum, looking should indeed be prioritized, but a museum also serves another important function that the Lucas attempts to sidestep: the production of knowledge and the education of the public. A museum’s primary role, like that of the discipline of art history, is to contextualize the art on view.

What has always fascinated me about art history is how it can help a novice delve deeper into the context in which a canonical work was made, particularly when it comes to figurative art. I still distinctly recall learning in my high school AP Art History course how the composition of Jacques-Louis David’s The Coronation of Napoleon (1807), and the placement of each figure from the French aristocracy, conveyed their stature in Napoleon’s court. It’s what made me fall in love with art history. (A guide to the who’s who in Miguel Covarrubias’s 1933 drawing Hollywood’s Malibu Beach would only enrich the experience of seeing it at the Lucas.) The joy of learning what art can teach us about the past is something I wish for everyone, from art-world professionals to the most casual museum visitors. You won’t find much of that here at the Lucas.

The lack of contextualization is most egregious when viewing Rockwell’s The Problem We All Live With (1963–64), one of six loans in the opening hang. Without a label, many visitors might not even know that the painting depicts six-year-old Ruby Bridges being escorted by US Marshals into a New Orleans elementary school that she was helping to desegregate. What viewers will immediately notice in the background are the N-word scrawled on the wall and a thrown tomato, intended for Ruby. What were Rockwell’s politics? Which problem, exactly, is he referring to? In this case, there is a clear answer to each question, and leaving room for ambiguity does a disservice to both Rockwell and the viewer. (For the record, Rockwell was criticizing white Southerners’ opposition to the desegregation of public schools; the problem is this country’s history of racism and anti-Blackness and the legacy of slavery.)

Given that the Lucas is situated in South Los Angeles, one of the city’s historically Black neighborhoods, this is all the more flagrant. What will it mean for a six-year-old Black girl, like Ruby was in 1960, to see the N-word displayed in a museum without any further context? Museums of the caliber to which the Lucas aspires have education departments that work tirelessly—and often with little thanks from the rest of the art world—to help visitors of all ages better understand what is on view and to foster conversations in the galleries about potentially controversial works like this. In doing so, they create opportunities for us to better understand one another and our shared humanity. That, after all, is the power of great art.

The Lucas instead laid off 15 full-time and seven part-time employees in May 2025, with the cuts mostly affecting its Learning & Engagement and Museum Services teams. At the time, the Lucas said that “education remains a central pillar” of its operations, while adding that its educational programming was still in development. (The press release for its opening, which runs 11 pages, doesn’t mention the word education or any programs of this kind.) In her remarks to members of the press on Wednesday, cofounder Mellody Hobson said that with this museum, her husband, George, “wanted to celebrate the illustrators who have often been underappreciated for their contributions, those who have narrated our lives in pictures, often using a single frame to tell a story.” She is right about that: illustration, with exceptions such as Rockwell, has long been marginalized by mainstream art museums. For that reason, the task before the Lucas is to convince us why these artists belong alongside masterpieces by Artemisia Gentileschi, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Pieter Brueghel the Younger, all of whom are represented in the Lucas collection and displayed downstairs (more on that later).

The lack of didactics speaks to a larger issue with the Lucas. As a new museum, it has always faced a monumental task: convincing both the public and the art world of its mission and purpose. By declaring itself the “Museum of Narrative Art,” its opening hang needed to make a compelling case for “narrative art,” a term it has essentially revived and one that is not widely used in art historical scholarship anymore. Simply put, it is art that tells a story, though that story can often be hard to interpret if a viewer doesn’t know the important visual cues of the work’s respective zeitgeist; that’s where art history and museums come in. On its website, the Lucas Museum describes itself as “an institution dedicated to the power of storytelling through images,” with Lucas himself adding that “[n]arrative art tells the story of a society—what the common beliefs are that hold it together.”

When I asked about the lack of didactics, chief executive Tracey Bates pointed me to the two-volume tome the Lucas has published with Taschen. (Not a single gallery copy was out in the galleries, by the way.) This is one of my biggest gripes with museums that save important parts of their curatorial arguments for the exhibition catalog: the average visitor doesn’t buy them because they are cost-prohibitive. The glossy two-volume edition costs $200, while the scaled-down 6-by-8.5-inch version is a more reasonable $30, though it is only available for purchase at the Lucas.

Like any good exhibition or permanent collection gallery, the Lucas needed to make a persuasive argument for why the works on view belong together. It doesn’t. An introductory text on the hang, longer explanations for each theme, and extended labels for select artworks would go a long way in highlighting the curatorial thesis for the Lucas. But those aren’t here at all—anywhere. There is no way for a visitor to orient themself to what they are about to see. There are only labels for artworks that say the artist name, the title (translated into Spanish), the year, and the medium (not translated for some reason).

Without these, I left the Lucas without a clear sense of how the museum is positioning itself or, frankly, without learning much about anything beyond what I already knew: the works on view or their makers; Lucas and Hobson’s motivations as collectors; when works entered the collection and why these works are worthy of further inquiry or study.

From a curatorial perspective, there’s no throughline here—the Museum of Narrative Art lacks any kind of narrative. The institution would be better off calling itself the Lucas Collection of Narrative Art, having wholly abdicated what should be an essential role of a museum: providing context, interpretation, and a coherent framework for the works it presents. In its current state, the title feels unearned.

In a way, this should come as no surprise. The Lucas is, after all, a private museum that reflects Lucas and Hobson’s tastes, preferences, and whims. The proposed mission and scale of the project, both conceptually and physically, suggested that the realized institution would be more than a collector’s display case. In hindsight, the $1 billion price tag was perhaps the best indication that the Lucas is, ultimately, a vanity project.

This isn’t to say that a collector-founded museum can’t be well executed. In the US, several of our most august art museums—from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and Crystal Bridges in Arkansas—began with the vision of a single collector, reflecting that founder’s connoisseurship and distinct predilections. But those founders ultimately handed over the keys to the kingdom to curators, who were charged with making sense of the collection, helping the public better understand it, and expanding it to fill gaps overlooked because of the founders’ own biases. Perhaps once GeorgeLucas decides to step aside, the Lucas can become the museum it has promised to be.

The Rockwell gallery also provides a clue to the limits of Lucas’s aesthetic taste. Rockwells continue to abound, as do artists from the mid-20th century working in similar stylistic modes of varying degrees of fame and art world acceptance. There are excellent works by N.C. Wyeth in the galleries that follow the one dedicated to Rockwell; Wyeth gets his own gallery too, though the works there are lackluster. Bringing it to the present, Lucas has found his present-day Rockwell in Kadir Nelson, best known for his illustrations for the New Yorker and other publications; at least a dozen works by him are on view throughout the galleries.

The Lucas has also dedicated a gallery to Jessie Wilcox Smith, the only woman to get one of the six single-artist rooms. Her room, however, is much smaller. I wasn’t familiar with Wilcox Smith’s work, but I found it touching, from an illustration of Goldilocks and the Three Bears to a little girl interacting with a cat to a mother showing affection to her daughter. I wish the Lucas could have enlightened me a bit more. A presentation like this could make the case for Wilcox Smith as an artist deserving further recognition and study, providing an example that other museums could soon follow. That, in turn, would cement the museum’s status as a site of knowledge production. But, to reiterate, that doesn’t happen here.

Interspersed throughout are exceptional works by Frida Kahlo, Charles White, T.C. Cannon, Carmen Lomas Garza, John Wilson, Paul Cadmus, Ernie Barnes, Grandma Moses, Archibald Motley Jr., and Norman Lewis. (Lewis is regrettably represented solely by a figurative work from 1941.) These works often feel quite unlike the rest and somewhat out of place, which, to my mind, raises the question of when they were acquired—namely, how close to the run-up to the museum’s opening. One particularly striking pairing is Fernand Léger’s Woman with a Cat (1955) and Hector Hyppolite’s The Woman in Green—The Siren (ca. 1947), both of which depict reclining women.

Progressing clockwise through the building’s exterior galleries, the quality of the art on view begins to decline sharply about midway, once you reach sections devoted to “Science Fiction,” “Fantasy,” “Romance,” and “Adventure.” The less said about these, the better. I was most disappointed, however, by the “History” section, which I thought might deal with history painting, once considered the pinnacle of Western art and an inherently narrative genre. Instead, it presents a hodgepodge of paintings depicting disparate historical moments: portraits of Emiliano Zapata and John F. Kennedy hang near each other, while depictions of the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlán and the American Revolution are close by.

For the most part, the Lucas shies away from difficult conversations. Save for a few works from the last decade of the 19th century, everything on view on the fourth floor dates from the 20th or 21st century. This, too, does a disservice to the art on view. Take the gallery titled “Work,” for example, where most of the works celebrate US industrialization in the 20th century, with an emphasis on white Americans. In one corner are a work by Narciso Martínez depicting Latino laborers (who are likely undocumented), a Charles White portrait of a sharecropper, and Shawn Michael Warren’s Abbot’s Waterway (2019), which almost certainly depicts prison laborers. All three works depict the exploitation of labor, a history directly tied to chattel slavery in this country and it’s worth emphasizing that the labor of enslaved Black people built this country.

Hidden among the works in the “History” section is a Jacob Lawrence screenprint, To Preserve Their Freedom (1988), depicting enslaved people escaping bondage. That this is the only work to confront slavery head-on is a shame. At a time when the Trump administration has gone to extreme lengths to erase references to slavery from the history of the United States—including through placards at the President’s Site in Philadelphia—engaging with these histories in museums is all the more important.

The gaps of the Lucas’s collection are also glaring. Its holdings lean so heavily toward white male artists from the mid-20th century, it’s no wonder it made sure to publicize the acquisitions of works like Robert Colescott’s George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1975) and Judith F. Baca’s archive for the Great Wall of Los Angeles. The lack of didactics does these works a disservice as well: both take distinct approaches to reconceptualizing American history from non-white perspectives, forcefully asserting the experiences of Americans outside of those narrow demographics.

Women don’t fare much better. In the section dedicated to depictions of sports, I counted just one depiction of women athletes among 20 artworks, while the “Science Fiction” and related sections feature scantily clad women depicted by men. In terms of racial diversity, Black artists are the most prominently represented, followed by Latinx artists, though even these numbers can feel like rounding errors once you realize that some 1,300 objects are on view. Works by Asian artists are mostly relegated to the “Manga” gallery, though “Graphic Stories” does include pages from Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. The experiences of Native Americans are almost exclusively represented through the trope of “cowboys and Indians” in the “American West” gallery. I don’t recall a single work that deals with queerness, nor anything that addresses non-Christian religions.

These gaps extend to medium bias as well. There is almost no sculpture on view, except for Yinka Shonibare’s Boy on Globe (2012), which is sadly reduced in its brilliance by its proximity to gaudy commissioned bronzes, including of Indiana Jones (inside the museum) and Jabba the Hutt (outside), or film costumes for Batman and the Cowardly Lion. Outside of a dedicated photography gallery, I counted just one photograph on view. It seems that Lucas has never heard of narrative photography (think Duane Michals), conceptual photography (Cindy Sherman), or works that pair text and image (John Baldessari)—entire genres that tap into the power of imagination to generate countless narratives.

I also have no idea why the nearly 40 works on view in the photography gallery have anything to do with one another, other than the fact that they are owned by the Lucas. Gordon Parks’s gut-punching images of the segregated South, for example, are hung close to photographs of the Beatles. Artists and celebrities constructing their identity for the camera is a narrative gesture in itself, one that many visitors would easily grasp in our image-saturated culture. But shots of Frida Kahlo and James Dean, look just like another famous image we’ve already seen.

There is not a single video work on view in the galleries, which seems particularly surprising for a collector who made his name in Hollywood. Perhaps Lucas believes moving-image art should be left to the “professionals.” I’ll go so far as to add another glaring omission: abstraction. While the non-objective art of early 20th-century modernism turned away from narrative readings, many artists working in abstract modes more recently have imbued their canvases with narratives, even if those narratives aren’t immediately apparent.

The saving grace is that the Lucas is one of the few museums to dedicate resources to collecting and presenting muralism, though these works are tucked away on the fifth floor of the museum’s southern portion. Here you’ll find Baca’s final colorations for the Great Wall, along with a video offering close-up views of the work; preparatory sketches by Thomas Hart Benton; and some of Banksy’s most famous works, which have been seemingly reimagined for the museum by the artist himself, who installed them. But a great museum would tell you more about how these works relate to each other and the legacies they are tapping instead of just putting them side by side in a way that’s jarring and chaotic.

One positive feature of the Lucas is that the majority of its galleries, with the exception of those dedicated to “Comics” and “Graphic Stories,” aren’t overhung. You can comfortably navigate the 30-odd collection galleries in about two hours. Despite the fourth floor’s size, it never feels daunting or exhausting, either physically or intellectually.

In terms of what it feels like to see art at the Lucas, the experience isn’t much better either: Tacky, polished-mirror signs, inexplicably spotlit, denote the thematic section you’re in. Artwork labels that translate only the titles but not the medium into Spanish gives the impression that the Lucas doesn’t believe Spanish-speaking visitors are sophisticated enough to care about the techniques used to make the work. The galleries themselves feel staid, with almost no thought given to innovative exhibition design. The best installation is in fact the one dedicated to the Star Wars franchise, with original set pieces and costumes installed in a dynamic way that gives it verve. If only as much care had been given to the galleries devoted to everything else. At times, it seems as though the Lucas were housed in a building adapted for a museum, its interiors never intended for displaying art, rather than in a purpose-built institution.

The galleries are also dimly lit to accommodate light-sensitive works, such as works on paper, displayed alongside paintings that can withstand greater levels of illumination. The low lighting wouldn’t necessarily feel so noticeable were it not for the natural light pouring in through the central oculus and three large windows on the northern, southern, and eastern sides of the building. Moving from one space to another can be jarring on the eyes. Two of these viewpoints, pardon the pun, are pointless: to the north is a dull view of downtown LA, with the Hollywood sign visible in the distance; to the east, Exposition Park and the ugly back of the Coliseum. The southern view, on the other hand, looks out onto the grounds the Lucas has added as part of its campus and a sun-drenched, palm-tree-lined vista of South Los Angeles beyond.

This is not to say that the Lucas hasn’t contributed anything to Los Angeles. I quite like the building’s futuristic design, whether interpreted as a cloud (as its architect intended) or a spaceship (as the press did). I think its continuously running film program will go a long way toward bringing cinematic treasures rarely shown on the big screen to newaudiences. Its addition of 160 acres of green space and a free research library, with no ticket required, certainly go a long way toward transforming the urban landscape and expanding access to education in this part of the city—but it is supposed to be a museum.

 From the museum’s perspective, I surmised, if I wanted to understand what narrative art is, I was supposed to start on the ground floor, where a single, long gallery is devoted to a display titled “The History of Narrative Art: Heroes · Myths · The Sacred.” I’m glad I didn’t. Calling this an exhibition is quite a stretch—“display” would be more appropriate—but then again, the Lucas seems intent on stretching and bending reality to suit its own purposes, as it has done by calling itself a “museum.” This display functions more like a mood board for the kind of art that led Lucas to try to make “narrative art” happen.

Here, you’ll find reproductions of famous artworks from across history, either digital iterations with a harsh backlight or sculptural ones, such as a copy of the Aztec Sun Stone sanctioned by the Mexican government. By way of explanation, Bates, the CEO, said, “Few of us can travel the world to see all these objects in person, but here in the ground floor gallery, they’ve been brought together for a journey everyone can take to the fundamental myths of narrative art.” But, seeing art in person is, after all, the whole point of a museum.

Yes, it is cost-prohibitive to travel the world to see these works, but the Lucas seems to be arguing that we should all be satisfied with encountering reproductions of masterpieces instead. So what, exactly, are we doing at the Lucas Museum?

As Bates explains, this section is baked into the museum’s DNA. That this display, which is more akin to the now-popular immersive experience, is presented ahistorically is all the more problematic. You walk through a tunnel beneath the cave paintings of Altamira; a few steps later, you arrive at the Sistine Chapel; at the back is the interior of the Hagia Sophia; somewhere along the way, there’s a detail from Trajan’s Column; and sandwiched between David’s Oath of the Horatii and Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII is ancient Egypt.

What’s most dispiriting is that there are great works from the Lucas collection on view here. Los Angeles now has another work attributed to Artemisia Gentileschi (and an associate), The Triumph of Galatea (mid-17th century). Also on view are the predella panel from Tommaso Bernabei’s Scenes from the Life of the Virgin (ca. 1525–28), Andrea Solario’s Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist (1520–24), Lucas Cranach the Elder’s The Judgment of Solomon (1526), and Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s The Alchemist (ca. 1600). If only they weren’t so difficult to see amid the glare of the digital reproductions.

This is the world of narrative art in which the Lucas wants to situate itself. Too bad it’s a flop, though I’m sure it’ll do just fine at the box office. (Adult tickets cost $25.) George Lucas is known for his world-building; the Star Wars franchise is widely praised for its complexity and nuance. If only he had given that same level of care to his new museum.