George Lucas' $1 billion spaceship-shaped narrative art museum opens this month in LA

The new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will serve “Star Wars” fans what they crave, but the saga George Lucas spawned represents just one small corner of the galaxy of creative work within the walls of the Los Angeles institution he calls a "temple to the people’s art.” The purpose of the palace that has become his life's work since he sold Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012 is to take the work of populist painters, commercial illustrators, comic artists and paperback cover-creators and treat it with a reverence normally reserved for Rembrandts. The building opens to the public Sept. 22. #georgelucas #lucasmuseum #starwars Follow ‪@APNewsEntertainment‬ and read more here: https://apnews.com/article/george-luc... Visitors to the new museum will be greeted by a bright yellow Naboo N-1 Starfighter from 1999's “The Phantom Menace” that hangs in the lobby of the public research library. The opening exhibit, “Star Wars in Motion,” shows production versions of Luke Skywalker's landspeeder from the original film and speeder bikes from 1983's “Return of the Jedi.” Nearly everything in the vast museum's 100,000 square feet of galleries comes from the personal collection of Lucas or Hobson, a major collector of African-American art. The filmmaker began collecting original comic art from newspaper strips like “Alley Oop” when he was in college and it could be had for pocket change. When blockbuster money started rolling in, he started buying paintings from commercial artists, including Norman Rockwell and Maxfield Parrish, that were deemed the height of uncool at the time. He joked at a San Diego Comic-Con panel last year that he needed a museum just to have somewhere to put it all. The building gives vibes of a spacecraft, a tree canopy and a cloud Visitors will walk through the museum designed by architect Ma Yansong eight years after its groundbreaking in Exposition Park, next to Lucas' alma mater: the University of Southern California. The museum has as much sci-fi and fantasy from Lucas' collection as from his own work. The sword-and-sandal comic book and paperback art of artist Frank Frazetta has a dedicated space. Nearby are huge, heavy-metal-epic paintings of images from J.R.R. Tolkien by Paul Raymond Gregory, complete with skull-studded frames. A children's section includes a painting of Eloise of “Eloise at the Plaza” fame by illustrator Hilary Knight, a painting of Pikachu modeled on a Van Gogh self-portrait from Pokemon illustrator Naoyo Kimura, and rooms full of anime and manga images. And the comic art that started Lucas' collecting has several halls dedicated to it, with some of the earliest drawings of “Star Wars” inspiration Flash Gordon on display, along with Flash Gordon's own inspiration, Buck Rogers, and proto-“Peanuts” panels from Charles Schulz, along with edgier alt-comic work from artists including Robert Crumb.