“People, in the beginning, were saying, ‘Why does it get dark?’ ” Lucas explains. “ ‘The animals eat us at night—why does that happen?’ So they said, ‘I’ll tell you the story.’ ”
The first gallery in the Lucas Museum, introducing its central concept, opens with a scale reproduction of the cave paintings in Altamira, Spain, from at least 14,000 years ago, photographed with an ultra-high-resolution camera and displayed, in close resolution, across the gallery walls.
“One of George’s friends, Caleb Deschanel”—the well-known cinematographer—“has been helping, because the lighting is very important to how it’s visually received by the viewers,” Hobson says. “George said, ‘I want you to look like you’re looking out a window.’ ” From their window onto the Altamira paintings, viewers will progress to a reproduction of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. “George calls it ‘God’s comic book,’ because the panels tell the story,” Hobson says.
“The Church and the State used illustration to create the myths that they wanted people to believe, because most people could not read,” she continues. The Vatican granted Lucas’s team special permission to photograph the chapel ceiling with the high-res cameras. “Everyone can’t go to the Vatican,” she says. “Not only that: When you’re in the Sistine Chapel, the visuals are so far away. You can’t see some of the detail of those stories. We bring them in.”
Before long, they are wandering through the museum’s more than 30 large galleries, most of which have been “paper-hung” with scale printouts of the artwork so that Lucas can make changes to position and sequence. Hobson—the keeper of the couple’s schedule—blazes ahead, clocking details quickly, eager to make it to their next engagement. Lucas goes through slowly and ruminatively, reinspecting almost every piece, pausing to discuss its qualities, making small noises of exasperation when he notices—apparently from memory—that one of the hundreds has been repositioned. The galleries are organized by myth. A Childhood gallery features artworks that, in Lucas’s view, construct the myths that give children an understanding of their position in the world. A Work gallery does the same for the idea of labor. There’s Motherhood, Romance, Fantasy, Play, Sport, War, and on. Some artists, photographers, and illustrators have their own spaces. “The audience creates the story, but there are certain things that you can put next to each other,” Lucas says. In his view, which might please George Herriman and Roland Barthes alike, the galleries are documentary: examples of how humans have passed along the stories of their societies.
“What is illustration?” he goes on. “You have to have a story, and the story is the mythology of the society. It doesn’t have to be true. In fact, everybody knows it’s not true, but it’s emotional. It sticks. It becomes important to the society, to bind it together. Humans are a little bit dysfunctional.” He lifts his gaze. “You need something to get them to work together.”
