Los Angeles —
In the gardens of the long-awaited Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a 19th-century cast of Antonin Mercié’s sculpture of David conquering Goliath neighbors a bronze statue of Princess Leia strangling Jabba the Hutt with a chain. Rosie the Riveter stands by, her gaze averted.
A collection of odd bedfellows, perhaps. But this party of underdogs also offer a fitting welcome to a sprawling new institution that, at every turn, argues that all forms of art and mythology on display here — from comic book illustrations and “Star Wars” concept art to Impressionist masterpieces and reproductions of the Sistine Chapel — are worthy of equal consideration within the long arc of human history.
More than 16 years after first proposing a cultural institution dedicated to visual storytelling, filmmaker George Lucas and his wife, businesswoman Mellody Hobson, will open their long-awaited museum in Los Angeles on September 22. The project made two false starts — plans to construct it in San Francisco and Chicago were both eventually abandoned — and has cost Lucas around $1 billion of his own money to build (the recently opened Obama Presidential Center, for context, cost $850 million).
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