The People's Art Gets a Billion-Pound Building

A week on Tuesday, on 22 September, a museum unlike any other opens in Exposition Park in Los Angeles. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has been roughly a decade in the making, cost somewhere north of a billion dollars of George Lucas and Mellody Hobson’s own money, and occupies a 300,000 square foot curve of pale concrete designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, set in thirteen acres of new gardens. It is the largest privately funded museum opening of the century so far, and it is built around a category that most major art museums have spent a hundred years keeping at arm’s length.

That category is illustration. Not illustration as a footnote to painting, but illustration as the main event: comic art, film concept drawings, magazine covers, storyboards, posters, photography and painting, all gathered under the heading of narrative art on the founding argument that telling stories in pictures is a universal human activity rather than a commercial sideline. The collection runs to tens of thousands of objects, anchored by decades of Lucas’s own collecting — Norman Rockwell in serious depth, N.C. Wyeth, R. Crumb and the underground comics, alongside the film material you would expect.

Why the critics are uneasy

The early notices have not been kind, and the objections are worth understanding because they are not simply snobbery. The most substantial complaint, made in various forms across the American press over the past fortnight, is that a museum organised around a category this broad struggles to say anything. If narrative art means any picture that implies a story, it takes in a Renaissance altarpiece, a Hogarth, a Marvel cover and a still from a film, and a hang that puts those in the same room needs an argument to hold them together. Several reviewers have concluded that the argument is not yet there — that the building is magnificent and the collection genuinely loved, but that the thesis is thin.

The counter-argument, made just as forcefully, is that the discomfort is the point. Rockwell was among the most widely seen artists of the twentieth century and was, for most of it, treated by the museum world as an embarrassment. Lucas has used the phrase “the people’s art” for what he collects, meaning work that large numbers of people love and that critical institutions have declined to take seriously. A museum built to correct that is going to irritate the people who did the declining.

The hierarchy is a British problem too

Before we treat this as an American argument about an American collection, it is worth noting how recently Britain got round to the same question. The Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration opened at New River Head in Clerkenwell on 5 June this year — the world’s largest space dedicated to illustration, in the grounds of an eighteenth-century waterworks that had never been open to the public. It took years of fundraising and a long search for a permanent home, and it exists because illustration in this country has had no national institution of its own. The Cartoon Museum has spent decades doing careful work on a modest budget. Comic art, animation and book illustration turn up in our national collections mostly as social history rather than as art.

The reason matters. The split between fine art and illustration is, at bottom, a distinction about who commissioned the work and why. Art made to a brief, for reproduction, for money, for an audience that did not choose it — that has historically been classed as applied rather than fine, and the classification has tracked class and gender and commerce at least as closely as it has tracked quality. Everyone in the sector knows this. Very few collections are organised as though they know it.

What an independent gallery might take from it

For anyone running or visiting a small gallery in Britain, there is a practical reading here. The line between fine art and everything else is policed hardest at the top of the system, by institutions with reputations to protect and canons to maintain. Independent galleries have never had much reason to observe it. Plenty of the most interesting programmes in this country already mix printmakers, illustrators, ceramicists and painters without feeling the need to rank them, and the audiences who turn up do not appear to mind.

The Lucas Museum may or may not turn out to be a good museum. A thesis can be assembled after a building opens, and it usually is. But the fact that it exists at all, at that scale and that expense, changes what can be said out loud about the hierarchy. Once a category has a billion-pound building, the argument that it does not count becomes harder to make with a straight face.

Whether that is a victory for the art or simply for the money is a fair question, and worth holding onto.