The Lucas Museum and the Question of Narrative Art

Leo Braudy proposes a historical and aesthetic rationale for George Lucas’s Museum of Narrative Art.

By Leo BraudySeptember 16, 2025

• Film

• Art & Architecture

WHEN THE LOS ANGELES City Council approved the construction on Exposition Boulevard of a museum funded by George Lucas and dedicated to narrative art, there were many cheers and a few jeers. One of the most high-minded negative responses came from Christopher Knight, the art critic of the Los Angeles Times, who said it was a “terrible idea,” argued that narrative art was “a made-up category,” and concluded that Lucas’s museum would be a monument to Hollywood kitsch.

Now, some seven years after construction began on the museum, with its lush surroundings and its striking visual combination of a spaceship with a rural meadow hairpiece, it is becoming somewhat clearer what its collection might include. Its core remains Lucas’s collection of souvenirs and collectibles from his own films, along with the work of underground comic creators like R. Crumb and painter-illustrators such as N. C. Wyeth (father of Andrew Wyeth) and Norman Rockwell. With a broad definition of narrative art as the representation of stories through images, the museum ambitiously looks to build a wide-ranging collection of works from a variety of artists, cultures, and eras.

Still, the question remains: What is narrative art? Or, to be more precise, what is visual narrative art, since stories without pictures—as in novels, plays, and operas—don’t fit the museum’s definition of its role?

From the time I started reading comic books as a four-year-old confined to bed because of polio, I have been very interested in narrative art. I still read the comics in the L.A. Times every day, and I have taught classes on the history of visual and verbal narrative. What intrigues me most in narrative art generally, and in visual narrative particularly, is the role of movement in the long history of human storytelling.

Unfortunately, the overwhelming presence of film—motion pictures, the movies—in the last 100-plus years has led to a long-standing prejudice about the past importance of motion in visual art. If, for example, you’ve read any of the histories of the movies or visited any of the museums around the world dedicated to film history, there’s invariably an introductory chapter or an exhibit dedicated to the “primitive roots” of what was gloriously realized in the invention of the cinema, ingenious devices with outlandish names like the thaumatrope, the phenakistoscope, and the zoetrope that use a series of individual images to mimic motion through animation. I still remember being fascinated by a later version of these machines of wonder when I was a kid visiting Atlantic City, New Jersey, where you could enter a penny arcade, drop a coin in a slot, and watch Chaplinesque pratfalls, soft-core veil dances, or even a flickering story.

But these apparatuses were also part of a much longer history. I might call what follows “Ideal Exhibits in a Museum of Narrative Art,” since it includes many works that can’t actually be shown because they exist in their own places around the world and can only be seen either in person or via reproduction. But each in its distinct way contributes to a global history of artistic efforts to express something of which the movies are only the latest instance. Even when those images seem static—in frescoes, paintings, bas-reliefs, sculptures, and the like—there is often an urge to represent movement in order to convey within an otherwise fixed medium the impression of physical motion, action, and elapsed time.

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Among the earliest forms of visual imagery are, of course, the cave paintings of Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa, which often feature images of animals, hunting scenes, dancing people, and handprints that may signify the presence of a specific creator. Although we can’t be absolutely sure what the images were meant to convey, cave painting is a familiar enough case of the impulse of ancient artists to create significant images that seem aimed at replicating and perhaps even controlling an otherwise fleeting reality. Capturing the image of an animal, for example, perhaps meant freezing it in time and thereby magically ensuring good hunting.

And the more that image resembled real perception, the more effective it might be: a ritualized version of observed life. Here also, therefore, in some of these early human efforts to create visual art, is the urge to transform a static image into a moving one. In Chauvet Cave in France, for example, the depiction of animals goes beyond the two-dimensional medium of charcoal or paint on a wall by including some with six legs, implying movement—and bearing a prescient resemblance to Eadweard Muybridge’s experiments with stop-motion photography in the late 19th century. Sequestered in dark interior spaces lit only by torches, flickering images similarly imply motion, while paintings on stalactites and stalagmites add a feeling of dimensionality. The closer to actual visual experience, the more powerful the charm.

Broadly speaking, cave painting begins a tradition of visual narrative in enclosed spaces, usually with a ritualistic, even religious emphasis, including what happens later in the history of Renaissance religious painting. The cave setting is a ritual space that looks forward to future enclosed ritual spaces, like the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii, with its wall paintings that seem to dictate to the viewer and participant exactly how the appropriate rituals should be performed—what clothing should be worn, what gestures are required, what objects have a special significance. The visual messages in such enclosed spaces emphasize the requirements of a ritual connection to a spiritual world beyond reality that can yet influence reality for the benefit of the participant.

A contrast is provided by the more ostentatious outdoor constructions that arrive with the establishment of kingdoms and empires. Political self-justification through grandiose visual media may have begun with the Egyptians, who pioneered intimidating megalithic statues of their rulers, of which the Sphinx and the Abu Simbel sculptures comprise only two of many examples. These images are static and thereby timeless—stylized images of the ruler and the gods who support his reign. Statues ensure stature; hard materials make a permanent claim on posterity as well as a ruler-friendly rampant masculinity.

But power also requires a more active narrative when it comes to battles against dynastic rivals and other foes. Such efforts to shape the meaning of events through a grandiose interplay of words and images also had a long Egyptian history. According to Egyptologists, for example, the 1274 BCE Battle of Kadesh, which pitted the forces of Pharaoh Ramses II against a Hittite army, was bloody but inconclusive. The main objective of the Egyptians—the recapture of the Hittite city of Kadesh, which had been captured by Ramses’s father Seti I before the Hittites resumed control—didn’t happen. After various skirmishes, the Egyptian army returned home and an Egyptian-Hittite peace accord was signed. But this didn’t prevent Ramses II, a pioneering self-publicizer, from declaring it far and wide as a total victory. Both written texts and visual representations of the battle in bas-relief were carved into temple walls and stelae across Egyptian territory—including images of Ramses II in his chariot sallying forth against the enemy—which is why the Battle of Kadesh has been called the most heavily documented battle in antiquity.

Somewhat cruder versions of victory in battle came with the Assyrian Empire, often referred to as the first world empire, which flourished a few centuries later to the east of Egypt. A recent show at the Getty Villa featured a group of bas-reliefs, primarily from the seventh and eighth centuries BCE. Along with the ceremonial portraits of the ruler and his titular gods, very similar to Egyptian celebrations of their rulers, there are two fascinating types of scenes involving motion: the ritual hunts of lions and bulls, in which the conquest of the monarchs of nature affirms the ruler’s power, and the victorious battles.

One particularly intriguing bas-relief has been referred to as “siege of an enemy town”; it includes severed heads of the defeated enemies. In fact, battle scenes in stone depicting the severed heads of the vanquished seem to be a cross-cultural brag. In Pashash, Peru, some centuries later, there’s a similar head collection. One possibility is that they symbolically suggest the defeated ruler, the head of his people. In another of Ramses II’s memorials to military victory, by contrast, the number of ordinary warriors defeated in battle is signified by bas-reliefs of a collection of chopped-off penises.

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Action scenes of rulers and armies in battle may suffice for an authoritarian society, but what about one that professed democracy and civic duty? Built over a 15-year period in the fifth century BCE to celebrate victory over the Persians, the temple of the Parthenon atop the Acropolis was the center of Athenian religious worship and ceremonies.

In variations of sculptural dimension from low relief to high relief to in the round, the temple visually instructs the viewer in history, myth, and immediate political and religious life. In the friezes is a detailed amalgamation of various civic processions and ritual occasions, including the Panathenaea, the annual celebration in honor of Athena. In the east pediment is the depiction of the birth of Athena, with Zeus, her father from whose head she emerged, enthroned; at the other end of the temple, in the west pediment, is the combat between Athena and Poseidon to be the prime god of Attica, which, of course, Athena won. Then, in the metopes, just above the temple’s columns, four wars of origin are depicted: the fall of Troy, the battle of the centaurs and the Lapiths, the battle between Theseus and the Amazons, and the giants versus the gods. Each conflict evokes a defeat of primitive violence and otherness that finally gives rise to the Athenian city-state.

The civic religious processions of the Parthenon are depicted in serene movement while the battles feature tangled bodies and physical savagery—two different types of motion in stone. A later and more elaborate version of the urge to convey movement as part of a political ritual can be found in Persepolis, in present-day Iran. Persepolis later was notoriously sacked and burned by the Greek army under Alexander the Great. But its walls remain, especially the staircases into the apadana (audience hall) of the palace. On these walls are bas-reliefs of groups of individuals climbing the stairs, peoples from some 23 lands subject to the empire, arrayed in a very specific ethnic order, characteristically dressed, and carrying characteristic offerings. These bas-reliefs, unmoving themselves although referring to an occasion of motion, represent an invariable protocol: the proper place to stand, and the proper way to move, when one comes to pay tribute to the great king and receive in return his gifts as part of a crucial ceremony in the establishment of a multiethnic empire.

But at the same time, these bas-reliefs are also frozen motion, an eternal moment of ritual, just as ritual itself is a repetition of action that opens the door to eternity.

The tribute-paying marchers on the walls of Persepolis are, like the cave paintings, in an interior space, and thereby at once partake in a form of ritual and offer a visual lesson in how to perform that ritual properly. They are like a political version of meditative religious paths, such as the Stations of the Cross or the labyrinth at Chartres.

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A significant step in the visual celebration of military victories and political power is Trajan’s Column, which still stands in the center of Rome. Just under 100 feet high, including its base, the exterior of the column is a spiraling bas-relief frieze that depicts Trajan’s victories in the Dacian Wars. On the column, Trajan appears almost 60 times in more than 100 scenes, with more than 1,000 other figures, including soldiers fighting and civilians fleeing burning homes, as well as detailed images of costumes, military equipment, and so on. These individual scenes and mini-portraits swirl upward chronologically to where the column was originally topped by a statue of Trajan himself.

Yet curiously, because of the grand height of the spiraling visual narrative, it is basically impossible for any modern spectator unequipped with a drone, let alone any Roman of Trajan’s own time, to see it all. As one art historian wrote, the column “failed as visual history.” But perhaps the inability to perceive the structure easily is the point. This is a narrative of scenes: the tangled bodies of men in combat, the enduring and repetitive figure of the emperor—originally noticeable because of his gleaming gold armor and purple cloak—holding the story together until the moment of ultimate victory. This is a monument to a history that can be admired by the ordinary viewer but never entirely perceived because only imperial power and greatness can encompass it whole and therefore successfully act in it.

In contrast to the flamboyant boldness of these assertions in stone is the Bayeux Tapestry of the 11th century. The tapestry was perhaps commissioned by Bishop Odo of Bayeux, William the Conqueror’s half-brother; overseen by William’s wife Matilda; and executed by the women of her court. It is roughly 230 feet long and was probably created for display in the Bayeux Cathedral at the time of its dedication, some 10 years after the Norman Conquest. In fact an embroidery in wool on linen rather than a woven tapestry, it shares with contemporary tapestries a format filled with visual details, even while it departs from the usual subject matter of Christian and classical myth by adding stitched-in Latin descriptions of what is happening in its 58 scenes.

In this artifact’s time of complex politics, political murders, and war, where the history books still have difficulty sorting out truth from propaganda, the Bayeux Tapestry has a single goal for its complex narrative—the justification for William of Normandy’s invasion of England in 1066 and his seizure (or, in his view, justified assumption) of the throne.

The effort to justify William’s invasion through a tangled prior history of religious oaths and feudal obligations in his relation to Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, takes up about half the length of the tapestry; the invasion by sea and the land battles, including the defeat and death of Harold, consume the rest. But why was the argument made in this particular format—why cloth, such a soft medium?

Might it be because the basic argument of the tapestry is about the nuances of feudal law and the endorsements of religious traditions while downplaying—even while illustrating—the military conquest and usurpation of the kingdom of an otherwise legitimate ruler? Intriguingly, there is at least one scene, of a woman escaping a burning home, that echoes a scene on Trajan’s Column. But unlike the column’s celebration of victory in battle, the Bayeux Tapestry is a narrative of persuasion, drawing upon the political, religious, and even astronomical views of the world (Halley’s Comet makes an appearance) to convince its viewers.

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The Bayeux Tapestry stands between the two traditions of visual narrative I have been describing. On the one hand, it is a justification for the assertion of male political and military power; on the other, it calls upon not just legal but also religious sanction for the proper way of behavior, and it is displayed in a church interior rather than engraved on a slab of rock or a triumphal column. In some significant ways, then, it derives from earlier pagan narratives of interior space, such as the Villa of the Mysteries. Within Christianity itself, it may also reflect the growing veneration of the Virgin Mary as a humanizing and domesticating counterweight or complement to the earthly power of the masculine lineage of popes and bishops.

This development evidences itself in visual narrative through an emphasis on the life stories of Christ, the saints, and other biblical figures. Ultimately behind this development are, of course, the Synoptic Gospels as well as the seventh-century proclamation by Pope Gregory the Great condemning iconoclasm and approving the use of visual imagery as a significant aid to the faith of the illiterate.

As it emerges in visual art of the early Renaissance, this biographic or hagiographic impulse may be presented in a group of multiple scenes that need to be read in what is not always an obvious order, or in a single painting that includes images of the same person at different times of life. Both in their different ways turn the visual space into a time-containing narrative of its own. In effect, each emphasizes that the true meaning of a life lies not in the crowning glory but in the path to it—not Christ enthroned like an earthly ruler but the life story, not the final sainthood but the steps along the way.

Each narrative emphasizes the need for the viewer to read properly, unlike the final unreadability of Trajan’s Column. Duccio’s grand altarpiece in Siena, Italy, for example, tells the life of Mary and Christ in 43 scenes, while Fra Angelico devotes 36 scenes to it. Throughout these images are constant reminders of lives in motion, upraised hands, feet about to step, gestures in the course of being made. And to add to the immediacy, the figures are dressed like contemporaries in Siena or Florence, set in landscapes familiar to their local viewers. This isn’t the realm of kings and gods but a familiar world, and these holy events could be happening here.

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Much more of this history is worth telling, but I’ll stop here, some 500 years ago, because other modes of visual storytelling, not to mention new technologies, are beginning to make the story more complicated—the rise of a secular theater in the 16th century, Alberti’s influential promotion of linear perspective in art, the invention of the printing press, and more.

I have been describing some significant moments in a long human history of visual storytelling in which the effort to show movement is an essential element. While a good proportion of these works come from Europe, many more from cultures around the world could have been included and should be in any fuller view of this history. The technology changes, the content changes, the purposes change, but the artistic urge to create a sense of the lifelike, the moving, the temporal in a visual art that is otherwise static remains unchanged. Motion pictures are only the latest example.

What I have briefly outlined indicates instead that any belief in the “progress” of the arts of narration is basically mistaken. Just because the technology has changed doesn’t mean that the artistic urge itself has changed. The past is not merely a partial or inadequate version of the present. Whatever the final shape of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art’s collection, some recognition needs to be paid to the fullness of the history that has preceded it. Only then will its own achievements be clear.

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Featured image: Phillip Maiwald. Persepolis stairs of the Apadana relief, September 3, 2008. CC BY-SA 3.0, wikimedia.org. Accessed September 12, 2025. Image has been cropped.