I've just staggered home from a preview of the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, which is scheduled to open to the public on September 22. Within the first 15 minutes I was already weak in the knees, and I still had an hour and 45 minutes to go.
The Lucas collection on display is astonishing. It contains major galleries of some of the best work by Maxfield Parrish, Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Frank Frazetta and many others.
Here are some of my favorites from the Parrish gallery:
This is the main Rockwell gallery, although there are many other examples of Rockwell's work scattered throughout the museum:
The museum owns works by Wyeth, Alphonse Mucha, Leyendecker, and many other famous narrative artists.
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| N,C. Wyeth |
Alphonse Mucha
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| Leyendecker |
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| Frazetta |
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| Frazetta |
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| Winsor McCay's Little Nemo |
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| Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon |
George Lucas made some remarks during the tour. He said that, throughout his career he had worked with talented artists whose work would never end up in a museum as a result of factors totally unrelated to quality. So he resolved to build a platform worthy of the art, one that would cause people to stop and regard this art with the kind of respect that it deserved. The result is the eye-popping, innovative, billion dollar museum soon opening in Los Angeles.
I heartily recommend it to anyone with an interest in this type of art, or any type of art.
22 comments:
Wow.
There was much wondering as to where many of these top-tier works went. Clearly Lucas was making his biggest purchases quietly, conspicuously leaving them off his museum's website too. Though many suspected it was him. Good to see all these great pieces finding a good home where not only will they be well-displayed for the public and given due respect, but also well cared for and, presumably, well-guarded.
Kev, I'm still uploading pictures from last night-- there are far more than I could post here, but I at least wanted to show Rockwell's famous Shuffleton's barber shop and Thanksgiving covers. Yes, they are all here. This is the kind of museum God would build if he had the money.
An astonishing collection. I can't wait to go.
JSL
There is a limited preview online, I hope more becomes available once the museum opens. Great to see these illustrators get the respect they deserve.
I was eagerly anticipating any kind of reaction from you about the museum. Happy to read you were among those who got an advanced tour (led by Mr. Lucas himself, nonetheless). Any chance you'll be working with the museum in the future? I wish I'll get the chance to visit it someday. I wholeheartedly applaud this enterprise. I wish the museum the fortune and glory it deserves.
This was my comment, forgot to login first...
Very limited so far ! The selection David has here is far more interesting than what's up on the website (which has at least one really bad piece)
(Ie, Colescott)
"There is a limited preview online, I hope more becomes available once the museum opens."
The opposite might be the case. The website was quite different during the museum's development; with many images and periodic updates. That website is gone, along with the multitude of images.
Speaking of which, an excellent shot of Maxfield Parrish's famous Garden of Allah was a standout on the site in its early days. Long in possession of Lucas, and considered one of Parrish's most famous and worthy works, it is not only gone from the site, but it doesn't appear in any of the photos of the museum either. What happened to Garden of Allah?
There is another "missing" work by Arthur Matthews; of a lady attending swans on a pond with a golden yellow sky. Both works had formerly hung at Skywalker Ranch. Possibly they still do, and Lucas wanted to keep a few pieces to enjoy at home/work.
Kev Ferrara-- I'm happy to report that The Garden of Allah is on the wall at the Museum, awaiting your inspection.
Colescott wrote: "the website (which has at least one really bad piece)"
I saw at least a dozen pieces in the museum that I regarded as bewilderingly bad. Manga drek. Cheesy paperback art. The aforementioned Boris. I'm not sure how to explain them, except to suggest. that maybe Lucas felt that he needed a comprehensive survey of the popular arts, an encyclopedic treatment where people could see the range of what was happening in the field. Fortunately, for me the beautiful art so vastly outnumbered the tacky stuff that it washed away my disappointment.
>>>>>>"Colescott wrote: "the website (which has at least one really bad piece)"
I think anon (not Colescott) was referring to Robert Colescott's absurdly retarded "George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware." Which the Lucas Museum blew $15 million to acquire. An obviously ideological purchase.
The internet offers the following: "Writing about the painting in 1984 for Artforum, Lowery Stokes Sims called George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware “a veritable masterpiece of unparalleled formal rigor and graphic grandeur,” which “radically rewrites the American national self-mythology, parodying the grandeur of historical genre painting while exposing the structural racial divides of the United States.”
The art may be bewilderingly bad. But so are the minds touting and praising it. This is the kind of thing that has degraded the term "cultural elites" to the point of it having a negative valence.
~ FV
Thanks for the clarification, FV. Sometimes I grasp too quickly for a way to distinguish all the anonymouses.
Kev Ferrara-- An interesting perspective, thanks. I don't remember seeing a Keane painting, and I assumed the Mel Ramos was to help viewers straddle the line between "fine" art and comics. I thought the one Banksy was actually pretty clever (and I think most of Banksy's work is well designed. The gossip was that Banksy himself came to the museum for a private viewing the day before our tour.).
Having said all that, I agree with your central point. I saw that awful Ken Kelly cover and other unfortunate pieces, such as that tacky sculpture of Princess Leia triumphing over Jabba the Hutt.
Those pieces are just a tiny percentage of the total collection. Unfortunately, the enemies of illustration will seize upon those few items in an effort to discredit illustration art. For example, the rather sniffy NYT review of the museum skipped over the abundant excellent art and prominently featured a photo of the Jabba the Hutt sculpture, a piece that's not even in the museum but rather way outside on the lawn.
Speaking as a collector, I have one other possible explanation for the occasional clinker amongst the art. The 1940s and 50s science fiction magazine covers were kind of clunky and nostalgic and quaint-- naive robots and old style rocket ships and scantily clad Martian princesses. The quality of the art was not great but sometimes when you're at an art auction with nothing superb and you have $6 billion burning a hole in your pocket, you talk yourself into thinking, "gee that might be a kinda fun thing to own."
"I think most of Banksy's work is well designed."
It communicates. One step above a road sign.
Continuing on the theme of the museum's heedless eclecticism, I forgot to mention: Dogs Playing Poker, Carl Barks' cartoon duck paintings, Frida Kahlo's unibrow, and Walker Evans!
Kev Ferrara-- I didn't mean "enemies of illustration" to sound as paranoid as it did. In this instance I meant those insufferable people who think they benefit from preserving class distinctions that keep illustration in a lower tier of art and keep illustrators underpaid. This could include former illustrators (such as Warhol) who are intent on pulling the ladder up after them, so that no other illustrators can escape into fine art; thieves like Richard prince whose lofty income depends on keeping the illustrations he plagiarizes in a separate category; but most of all, the pretentious art critics, grad students and gallery owners who need something reliable to sneer at, and who lack the vision to look at the elements of pictures on a level playing field.
Re Banksy, I guess I would say he is not primarily an artist so much as a clever and interesting social commentator. He does deliver his messages with an eye toward the aesthetics. The girl with the red balloon, for example, would not be nearly so effective it if was placed elsewhere, or if the sprayed black and white girl didn't contrast so nicely with that well placed balloon.
>>>>>>>>"I forgot to mention: Dogs Playing Poker, Carl Barks' cartoon duck paintings, Frida Kahlo's unibrow, and Walker Evans!"
Then I don't get the criteria for inclusion. It's all over the map. Kahlo and Walker Evans aren't pop culture.
~ FV
"Then I don't get the criteria for inclusion. It's all over the map. Kahlo and Walker Evans aren't pop culture."
Identifiability is the criteria. Virality is the common theme. These are memetic works; ubiquitous, they’ve gotten everywhere and into everything. Everybody knows them. The Kahlo and Walker Evans are as instantly recognizable as R2D2 and the Maxfield Parrish classics.
The problem is that “pop” has meanings outside of mere popularity. That of shallowness, convention-based construction (thus emotional simulation, generic authoring, and intellectual shallowness), slick technical crafting, and mass production & distribution. But it ain’t necessarily so.
Howard Pyle once said that all great works are popular, but not all popular works are great. This museum, intentionally or unintentionally, makes that point public.
I’d add, the excitement surrounding the museum and the value of the works is also a riposte to Walter Benjamin’s belief that mass reproduction familiarity wholly diminishes an original work of art’s aura. It seems rather that the works that are the most reproduced have a kind of conceptual and visual ideality to them that makes them quasi-religious objects. And they are reproduced for the sake of mass veneration. The more reproduced, the more, in a sense, worshipped. To see them in actuality, in living state, is to bear witness to a cultural holy relic. Sort of like seeing a famous person in real life.
FV wrote: "I don't get the criteria for inclusion. It's all over the map. Kahlo and Walker Evans aren't pop culture."
The unifying theme, according to Lucas himself, is "narrative" or "storytelling" art (as opposed to art for art's sake, abstract art, etc.) The first floor of the museum is a historical, holographic chronology of what Lucas considers narrative art, starting with the cave paintings of Lascaux and the Willendorf Venus, and proceeding through pictures of myths and legends in ancient Greece and the Renaissance.
Karl Barks and Walker Evans and even Kahlo certainly all fit under the umbrella of narrative art. However, one would like to think Lucas could've done a better job of limiting the exhibition to story telling art that was also visually strong. I know for a fact that Lucas has a great deal of splendid art in his collection that is not on display.
Upon reflection, I think it's most accurate to say that there are really two filters at work in this selection: art that is both narrative AND reflective of the personal, eccentric taste of the collector, in the tradition of the Barnes collection in Philadelphia. You have a wealthy collector with strong personal taste that runs contrary to the popular "fine art" taste of his day. He chose not to outsource his choices to "experts" the way many tasteless billionaires do. Instead, he chased and bought what he genuinely liked. Sometimes those choices pay off (as with the Barnes collection) and sometimes it doesn't.
>>>>>>"Sometimes those choices pay off (as with the Barnes collection) and sometimes it doesn't."
You seem to be implying that your ultimate judgment on the Lucas museum is that it doesn't "pay off" because Mr. Lucas' taste is lacking. The consensus seems to be the reverse, that it works despite his lapses.
~ FV
My point about the Barnes collection is that it’s more interesting because it reflects the erratic taste of one wealthy individual. Barnes was prescient about the impressionists and Matisse. He made many superb choices ahead of his time, despite the ridicule of the “old money” collectors. Those masterpieces are side by side with Courbet’s “Woman With White Stockings,” a highly realistic painting of a woman’s vulva, commissioned in an era when wealthy gentlemen who loved women’s genitals had to hire a painter to depict them. And that is next to a huge collection of pen and ink sketches by Glackens because Glackens was a personal friend of Barnes. If the museum was compiled by a committee of “experts” many of those pieces would be filtered out for one reason or another. I like the fact that the Barnes is a reflection of one interesting man’s personal taste, and I like the Lucas museum for the same reason, despite what I would conclude is an occasional clinker.
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