George Lucas has called his new museum “a temple to the people’s art.” The Journal sent two critics — one for the art, one for the building — and they arrived, from different directions, at nearly the same finding.
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens Sept. 22 in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park. Designed by Ma Yansong of MAD architects, it is 700 feet long with 300,000 square feet of space, and stages more than 1,300 of Lucas’s own objects across 33 galleries and 100,000 square feet of exhibition space. At least one of his estimated $5 billion-plus fortune reportedly went into the building.
What’s genuinely there
Both critics are fair about the holdings, and they are not trivial: an Egyptian limestone relief, a sculpture of George Washington by Jean-Antoine Houdon, a substantial photography collection, and pictures by Pissarro, Renoir, Van Gogh, Léger, Picasso and Kahlo.
Lance Esplund singles out the “Children’s Stories” gallery — treasures by Ludwig Bemelmans, Jean de Brunhoff, Arnold Lobel, Beatrix Potter, Maurice Sendak and John Tenniel, plus the Cowardly Lion’s costume — where, he writes, “your childhood will come vividly back to life.” There are dynamic comic strips by masters of the form. The “Cinema” section, full of storyboards, props and life-size dioramas, is where the museum is most at home.
The governance problem
Here is the detail that explains the reviews. In 2025, roughly two dozen employees departed — including Chief Curator Pilar Tompkins Rivas and Director and CEO Sandra Jackson-Dumont. Lucas has been de facto chief curator since December.
“Museum professionals’ lack of involvement shows,” Esplund writes. The holdings are presented without interpretive reasoning — ceaseless rows of pictures separated merely by genre, under broad headings like “History,” “Family,” “Fantasy,” “Romance.” His verdict: the museum, “built not on aesthetics but on nostalgia and spectacle — confuses a collector’s obsessions with genuine vision.” By eschewing contextualization and hierarchy, he argues, it “reduces all artworks to mere illustrations, and all artists to mere illustrators.”
Michael J. Lewis, reviewing the architecture, is warmer — the building is exuberant, and he says so, noting that criticizing something this sincere mostly makes the critic look bad. The entrance is “the glory of the museum.” But he finds the fourth-floor gallery, comprising most of the exhibition space, treated as one great loft sliced by nonstructural partitions, with spray-on fireproofing visible overhead: “the utilitarian treatment of a box store or trade show above the museum’s most important objects.”
His deeper objection is about sequence. Nothing enjoys pride of place; everything is equally important. “We are keenly aware of Mr. Lucas’s pride and delight in each acquisition, and he lets us see them, one after another, just as a stamp collector might leaf through his album.” And then the line that lands hardest, given who built it: “there is no rising action, no climax, no falling action . . . which is no way to tell a story.”
The most successful storyteller of all time built a building that doesn’t tell one.
The uncomfortable parallel
A single owner, deeply knowledgeable and genuinely passionate, removes the professionals who would have said no, and assembles everything he loves with nothing edited out and nothing ranked.
That is also a portfolio. Specifically it is the portfolio of a successful person who has been right about things before: a long list of positions, each acquired for a real reason, none ever sold, nothing weighted, no thesis that could be disproven. Every holding has a story attached and the story is always about why it was bought.
What’s missing in both cases is the same thing: editing. Hierarchy. A willingness to let something go so the rest can be seen clearly. Curation is mostly the discipline of exclusion, which is why it is easier to hire than to do yourself — and why nobody, however successful, is a reliable critic of their own collection.
The museum will be a genuine pleasure for a lot of families, and that is worth something too. But the reviews are a useful reminder that being the person who acquired everything makes you the worst-placed person to decide what deserves the wall.