Narrative Art

The term “Narrative Art” has been very much on my mind with the opening of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles. The museum’s mission is “to explore how narrative art shapes our world, expresses beliefs, communicates values, expands imagination, and invites conversation.” The galleries are organized around themes such as Comics, Children’s Stories, Fantasy, History, and Community, naturally including material from the Star Wars and Indiana Jones universes.

This week FF sends me a French advertising poster with the narrative theme of enjoyment at the circus. In the signed Émile Finot work, well-dressed 1930s crowds enjoy a carnival (buy your tickets!). Finot is the Art Nouveau lithographer who became wildly popular with his first advertising poster, Eureka Les Troubadours, in 1905. George Lucas built an empire by understanding the same visual storytelling principles that Finot, Mucha, Toulouse-Lautrec, and other poster artists pioneered 170 years ago.

Advertising posters, which entered the design world in the mid-19th century, were a means of mass communication using art, history, and design, and aimed at popular culture and consumption for promotion of a product or event, or even propaganda. I am fascinated to see if the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will include great advertising posters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as the iconic propaganda posters of the two World Wars. These works occupy a pivotal place in the history of narrative art. Like the imagery of Star Wars, they were created to persuade, inspire, and sell. The medium has changed, but the underlying principle has not: a powerful image coupled with a compelling story sells a point of view, a product, a myth…

George Lucas understands better than anyone the extraordinary power of visual storytelling. The Star Wars films have generated more than $10 billion at the worldwide box office to date, while the broader franchise – including toys, books, home entertainment, games, and licensing – has exceeded $46 billion in estimated revenue. Those remarkable figures illustrate a simple truth: images that tell compelling stories create emotional connections that people remember, collect, and purchase.

Long before movie franchises, artists such as Jules Chéret, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Alphonse Mucha designed lithographic posters to promote theaters, and to sell bicycles, travel, and consumer products. Their posters were advertisements, certainly, but they were also visual stories, allowing viewers purchased entrée into that glamorous world. George Lucas has created a museum devoted to narrative art because narrative imagery is among the most powerful forces in culture. The same principles that helped make Star Wars a $46 billion franchise also made the 19th century advertising poster one of the great artistic inventions of modern life. 

In many respects, the 19th century advertising poster and the 21st century movie franchise are close cousins. Both rely on memorable imagery, recognizable characters, and carefully constructed visual narratives that invite viewers to participate in the stories they tell. FF’s poster sold the circus, or the newly invented bicycle, War Bonds, or champagne. Star Wars likewise sells a mythology. George Lucas has simply elevated the advertising poster into a global narrative universe, now memorialized in a museum.

The narrative history of storytelling in images goes back to human origins. Narrative art shows a moment in time, a sequence of events evoking the past, present, and future. An artist who creates narratively relies on the mono-scene (a frozen moment), or on a sequential scene told over a series of panels, such as in a Marvel comic book or the storyboarding of a movie. As is the vocabulary of the early advertising poster, the vocabulary of narrative work consists of characters, settings that determine time and place, and cultural symbols (viewers are acquainted with these symbols as part of the storytelling).

A narrative visual language in art remains one of the most enduring forms of communication, from the three-panel screen behind an altar, to the Japanese scroll, to the modern comic book, to the movie poster. Western art was primarily narrative until the 20th century, through religious images and images from myth and history. Middle class collectors in the 19th century loved paintings of everyday people; these are termed “genre” paintings. This is the period of the birth of the advertising poster. Narrative art flourishes wherever images communicate ideas, evoke emotion, and tell stories – whether on the streets of Paris in 1895 or in a galaxy far, far away.

The intent of the work of art is the heart of the vexing art vs commerce question. Because art “sells” something, does it cease to be art? FF’s circus poster, ca. 1930 France, memorializes a time when entertainment, a village circus in this case, created its own special, simpler universe. It is worth $500 to collectors of vintage advertising posters.