The Lucas Museum Doesn’t Have a Narrative
ARTnews reports that the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, a private institution costing more than $1 billion and developed over nearly two decades, is set to open to the public on September 22 after earlier plans in Chicago and San Francisco were scrapped. The article argues that despite cofounder George Lucas’s stated desire to challenge rigid definitions of art, the museum’s galleries provide little interpretive narrative to connect its wide-ranging holdings. A prominent section devoted to Norman Rockwell includes major works such as Shuffleton’s Barbershop (1950), which Lucas reportedly bought for $20 million to $30 million before it went to auction from the Berkshire Art Museum, as well as The Gossips (1948), Horseshoe Forging Contest (1940), and The Connoisseur (1962). The museum also juxtaposes Rockwell’s The Runaway (1958) with Richard Williams’s The Militarization of the Police Department—Deadly Force (2014–15), and it commissioned a bronze version of Rockwell’s Triple Self-Portrait (1960) even though the original is at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Massachusetts.
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This story was covered in Funding Fights, Fee Hikes, and Biennale Blowback