A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, George Lucas was a gifted film director. The release of Star Wars in 1977 – long before we had to call it Part IV or A New Hope – was a seismic event in modern culture that abolished the difference between art and entertainment.

It was not a metaphysical allegory of the future but simply a good story. The point of setting it in the past in a remote part of the universe is that it has no relevance to reality here on Earth. It’s a tale, a legend, a myth. Lucas put aside every value except narrative excitement and identification with his characters. This was an epic yarn, pure and simple.

Now Lucas is to create, at his own huge expense, a museum in Los Angeles that not only shows off his collection of art along with relics from his films but makes an argument about art’s purpose.

It is to be called the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. In its very name it thus restates the most original thing about Star Wars, that Lucas brought storytelling back to cinema. Can he restore the narrative impulse to modern art – and would that be a good thing?

When he praises narrative in art, Lucas clearly doesn’t mean a cathartic performance by Marina Abramović or a historically evocative film by William Kentridge. His collection of over 10,000 items stresses painters and graphic artists whose work is highly accessible. That master of folksy American scenes Norman Rockwell features among his treasures, as does the brilliant comic book art of Robert Crumb. Lucas also collects the work of NC Wyeth, who illustrated boy’s adventure books with exciting images of derring-do.

Put all this together with his Star Wars memorabilia and you have a museum that is likely to elicit scorn from art world snobs. Tate Modern or MoMA it ain’t. Instead, it’s an honest personal vision of what art should be like – and Lucas may be vindicated, just as he was when Star Wars entranced the world four decades ago.

He is right. Art has forgotten the power of popular storytelling that was once its main reason to exist. In previous ages the most important job of visual art was to tell tales. Painters and sculptors were commissioned to create compelling narrative art that was put in churches to move and harrow the whole community. A painting like Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ (1450s) is a masterpiece of concentrated storytelling that beautifully distils an episode from the New Testament and makes it easy to identify with – Piero has even set the scene in his local countryside with his home town San Sepolcro visible in the background.

Popular religious storytelling evolved from dense medieval comic-strip art to Renaissance miracles of human drama like Piero’s Baptism or Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. As art became more secular in the 18th century it did not lose its passion for storytelling. The same techniques artists had perfected to narrate the Bible allowed them to tell powerful stories from history, novels or modern life like John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark (1778) – more Jaws than Star Wars, I suppose – and Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress.

Paintings that told stories provided the cinema of the Romantic age. People queued up to see paintings like Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa or The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Delaroche. Today this instinct for gutsy, popular storytelling is exiled from the art world. Culturally respected art tends to be abstract or conceptual. Painters who tell stories, like Norman Rockwell, get faint praise at best.

A lot has been lost. The passion for narrative is universal. Why can’t visual art address the same need for a good story that is satisfied by Game of Thrones? Forty years ago George Lucas changed cinema. Perhaps now he can save art.