The film director Claude Chabrol once showed how to write a truly rapturous review of a picture book in a single sentence. It went: "I spent the most beautiful night of my life yesterday with David O. Selznick's Hollywood." The book in question captured the lavish perfectionism of the producer behind King Kong and Gone with the Wind with the same almost fanatical exuberance he brought to his films. I'm happy to steal those words. I spent the most beautiful night of my life yesterday with Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.
The institution of the same name, founded by the director and Star Wars creator George Lucas, opened in Los Angeles this week. Yet the two slipcased volumes are more than a companion publication to the new museum, which presents itself in their pages as a kind of promised land. The books are themselves a product of exactly what the museum collects: visual storytelling.
In their whirl of high and low, they may even go further than the museum itself. With five floors, 35 galleries, and two cinemas, the building has to keep its founder's collecting areas somewhat apart, if only for order's sake. But anyone prepared to give Frida Kahlo and Peg-Leg Pete equal attention simply has no use for cultural borders.
A heightened, overdressed reality
The publisher Benedikt Taschen must see it much the same way. He made this book a personal priority and, credited as director and producer, glides alongside Lucas through highlights from 40,000 collection pieces like the Thief of Bagdad on his magic carpet. Placing children's book illustrations and comic art on a par with murals by Thomas Hart Benton or Diego Rivera is as self-evident here as it remains shocking to some. A few U.S. critics responded with outrage. Walt Disney heard much the same in 1940, when his musical animation Fantasia sent pastel-hued centaurs flying to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony.
As for recognized high art, which the sheer abundance of 832 pages relegates to a minority role anyway: does it diminish Fernand Léger's La Femme au chat (1955) and Renoir's Les enfants au bord de la mer when Lucas places them next to cover illustrations from the Saturday Evening Post, whose painters Melbourne Brindle and Stevan Dohanos celebrate a Technicolor midcentury Biedermeier? Or is elevating the latter a deliberate provocation?
That's hard to argue. Nobody buys a Pissarro or a Winslow Homer to prove the illustrators could do just as well. Of course, this is about appreciation, short-circuiting aesthetically conservative positions with avant-garde ones. But it's the same luxuriant immersion in a heightened, overdressed reality that you get from a Douglas Sirk film of the same era.
The margins break open the canon
Yet Lucas and editor Jessica Hundley by no means celebrate political conservatism in the same breath. In the image sequence on "Work, Home, Community," they honor Hector Hyppolite, a Haitian painter who took his cue from Matisse in the 1940s. Archibald J. Motley Jr., one of the key artists of the Harlem Renaissance, gets his due, too, with his 1927 painting Stomp.
And so it goes throughout. Whether the focus is American history, everyday life, or fantasy worlds, marginalized positions keep breaking open established ones. Discrimination is countered, socially and aesthetically alike. The unpredictable current that results sweeps you along like the river in the Western River of No Return.
In expanding the notion of illustration, Lucas reaches back to the Renaissance. Among the earliest works in the collection is The Triumph of Galatea by Artemisia Gentileschi "and associates," which came up at Christie's in 2020 for around €2 million. Lucas appears to have acquired it deliberately—as proof that storytelling in pictures wasn't always labeled "illustration" and thus subordinated to literature as "applied art."
Dreams for millions
Lucas sees in the popular pictorial narratives of the early 20th century a strand of narrative art that split off from museum art and refused modernist tendencies. Naturally, his own Star Wars mythology has its place too. Notably, back in 1975, despite a tight budget, he let production designer Ralph McQuarrie fill enormous formats with gouache designs—as if a museum were already on his mind.
In Winsor McCay's Little Nemo comics or Maxfield Parrish's book and magazine tableaux, academic craft and fantastical vision fused into dreams for millions. These artists never lived to see six-figure sums paid for their originals. The museum order simply passed them by. Meanwhile, at Heritage Auctions in Dallas, the world's leading auction house for collectibles, some illustrators now command astronomical prices.
Last year, a cover painting for a Conan novel by the fantasy master Frank Frazetta, barely 50 cm tall, sold for the equivalent of €11.5 million. And even though Lucas added to his Frazetta holdings for a sum in the millions as recently as last November, it's easy to believe him when he says he never saw collecting as investment or trade.
An art made to be reproduced
"One of my first acquisitions was a $35 original by V. T. Hamlin from a 1930s comic strip, Alley Oop," he writes in the foreword. "I bought more art that moved me—without worrying about what others thought. For me, art is a personal experience, regardless of cost or fame. Over the decades, I amassed 40,000 pieces and have never sold a work."
For Lucas, though, narrative art—at least in these volumes—always means figurative art. And he clearly prefers the idylls (however often critically undercut) of Norman Rockwell, whom he collects in friendly rivalry with Steven Spielberg, to the satirical modernism of Saul Steinberg. Indeed, the urban illustration of the New Yorker interests him far less than magazines aimed at a rural readership.
Then again, Al Hirschfeld received his museum consecration long ago, while the late-Impressionist illustrator Jessie Willcox Smith (1863–1935), who devoted herself to the world of childhood, is still waiting to be discovered. That this may work even better on paper than across 28,000 square meters of museum space in Los Angeles has a lot to do with an art form that came into being purely to be reproduced.