Lucas Museum Opens in Los Angeles, Putting Comics Alongside Fine Art

After years of planning and construction, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has opened its doors in Los Angeles. Founded by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, the museum occupies a 300,000-square-foot building in Exposition Park designed by Ma Yansong of MAD with Stantec.

Its scale is substantial: more than 100,000 square feet of exhibition space spread across over 30 galleries. The opening exhibitions bring together more than 1,300 works, moving between painting, illustration, photography, murals, cinema, comics and other forms of visual storytelling.

Inevitably, the Lucas name makes Star Wars part of the story. The museum holds the Lucas Archives and its inaugural cinema presentation includes vehicles from the first six films. But reducing the institution to a home for movie memorabilia misses much of what is happening elsewhere in the building.

Comics are not treated as a side room

That distinction matters for cartoonists. The museum’s founding idea places forms that have often sat outside traditional definitions of fine art — particularly illustration, comics and cinema — within the same broader history of images.

The museum itself is unusually direct about this. In its opening announcement, it notes that illustration, comics and cinema have not historically received the same recognition as painting, sculpture and photography. At the Lucas Museum, they are presented on equal footing.

That position becomes concrete in a gallery devoted to Comics • Graphic Stories. Drawn from the museum’s holdings of American and European comics, it includes work by Mœbius, Marie Severin, Jack Kirby, Alison Bechdel, Jim Lee, Frank Miller and Rafael Navarro.

Manga has its own presentation, while other parts of the collection extend the comics history further through artists including Winsor McCay, George Herriman and R. Crumb. The result is less a single survey of comics than a decision to let the medium appear throughout a much larger account of visual storytelling.

From Herriman and Kirby to Bechdel and Mœbius

Lucas has been collecting narrative art for more than five decades. The museum says its founding collection now contains more than 40,000 works, ranging from familiar names in American illustration to comic artists, muralists, photographers and painters.

For comics readers, some of those connections cross generations that are not often shown together. George Herriman and Winsor McCay sit within the same institutional collection as Jack Kirby, R. Crumb and Alison Bechdel; European comics enter through artists such as Mœbius.

It is a broad definition of the field, and deliberately so. The museum is organised around storytelling rather than around a hierarchy of media. A comic page can therefore be considered beside an illustration, a mural, a photograph or an object made for a film without first having to justify its presence as “fine art.”

An archive of more than 30,000 comic books

The galleries are only one part of the comics story. The museum’s Research Library contains more than 30,000 comic books, with particular depth in Silver Age material.

The library’s special collections broaden that history beyond mainstream comic books. Its holdings include material connected with Kitchen Sink Press, the independent publisher closely associated with underground comics, as well as work by R. Crumb.

This may ultimately prove as useful to comics scholarship as the works displayed upstairs. A permanent research collection allows material that is usually scattered between private collections, publishers and specialist archives to be studied within a larger history of popular visual culture.

A museum built around the argument

The Lucas Museum is not presenting comics as a recent discovery. Its argument is more fundamental: images made for newspapers, magazines, books, comic books and screens belong to the history of visual storytelling just as surely as images made for gallery walls.

That explains why Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth and Frank Frazetta receive dedicated presentations while comics, manga and graphic stories have their own galleries. Elsewhere, works by Frida Kahlo, Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, Robert Colescott, Diego Rivera and Judith F. Baca widen the museum’s frame considerably beyond popular entertainment.

George Lucas summed up the premise at the opening in simpler terms. Speaking about the artists whose work he has collected, he said: “They deserve to be in a museum.”

For cartoonists, that sentence may be more significant than the familiar film props elsewhere in the building. Comics are not being brought in as an occasional exhibition or a temporary concession to popular culture. They are part of the institution’s permanent argument about what images can do.

The opening does not settle the old argument over where comics belong. It does, however, give that argument a very large new address in Los Angeles.

Sources & Further Reading

• Lucas Museum of Narrative Art — Grand Opening
• Lucas Museum of Narrative Art — Public Opening and Research Library
• Lucas Museum of Narrative Art — Inaugural Exhibitions
• Lucas Museum of Narrative Art — Plan Your Visit