Boris Vallejo, the Artist Who Helped Us Imagine Star Wars,Star Trek, and So Much More

In 1977, after the massive box office success of the first Star War movie, Paramount Pictures decided to capitalize on the surging popularity of the space opera. Rather than produce a new film, they re-released the 1968 movie, Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy, starring Jane Fonda. Barbarella—based on French cartoonist Jean-Claude Forest’s Barbarella comics (with sets designed by Forest)—bore little resemblance to Star Wars. But the poster for the re-release spoke the same visual language as Tom Jung’s Star Wars movie poster. Both drew upon themes from existing fantasy art, depicting heroes and villains in dramatic poses. In place of Luke Skywalker raising his lightsaber skyward, the Barbarella poster featured the scantily clad but powerful form of Jane Fonda, holding a large ray gun against her form-fitting costume. Although the movie is today regarded as a cult classic lacking broad appeal, Barbarella had an outsized influence on the visual style of science fiction movies that followed—and the poster became iconic. The poster’s artist, Boris Vallejo, became one of the stars of the science fiction and fantasy art world.

Born in 1941 to parents from Chile and Spain, Boris Vallejo grew up in Lima, Peru. He started drawing at a very young age, when one of his parents taught him to draw the cartoon character Popeye. He drew pictures on his mother’s kitchen walls and eventually filled them with his art. While still in high school, one of Vallejo’s drawings won an art competition and he was awarded a scholarship to the Escuela Nacional Superior Autónoma de Bellas Artes (National Superior Autonomous School of Fine Arts) in Lima. There, he attended evening life drawing classes after his high school classes. Learning alongside adult art students, Vallejo stood out for his youth and his talent. The other students would pause their work to watch him draw.

After high school, Vallejo spent two years working as a freelance artist, drawing and painting for local advertising firms. The work was straightforward and mostly involved creating images of products for sales catalogs and newspaper inserts. Even on such simple assignments, however, his abilities were apparent. One of the art directors he worked for in Lima encouraged him to go to the advertising capital of the world: New York City. At his urging, Vallejo decided to leave Peru to pursue a career in advertising art in the United States.

When Vallejo arrived in New York in 1964, he didn’t know anyone, hadn’t lined up a job, and had no place to live. He spent his first few nights in the city riding the subway, sleeping on the train. One evening, while eating at a diner, he overheard people at a nearby table speaking Spanish. He struck up a conversation and learned that they lived together in a house that rented affordable rooms to immigrants. Vallejo was able to rent a room in the house and made his first business contact—one of the other renters had a cousin from Peru who ran an advertising firm in Connecticut. He moved to Connecticut and began his career in American advertising.

Vallejo didn’t stay in Connecticut for long. After establishing himself as an artist for hire, he moved back to New York City. He found an apartment in Greenwich Village, where he continued doing freelance artwork for advertising agencies. He was surrounded by artists participating in the 1960s counterculture and was exposed to new artistic styles. It was here that Vallejo saw the work of comic book artist Frank Frazetta. Frazetta was known for his fantasy and science fiction illustration work, which included cover art created for popular comics and pulp novel series such as Conan the Barbarian and Buck Rogers.

Vallejo was captivated by the beautiful and fantastical worlds Frazetta created through his artworks, which demonstrated the storytelling potential of art, and decided that this was the type of work he wanted to pursue. One thing that drew Vallejo to Frazetta’s art was the fact that it tended to feature muscular male and female figures. Vallejo had taken up bodybuilding while in Peru and began to use his fellow bodybuilders in New York as models for fantasy paintings. (In 1989 he met his wife and artistic partner, Julie Bell, in the bodybuilding community.) His work was informed by his early training in figure drawing, but now he was drawing “amazing people.” Vallejo would also come to be influenced by space artists such as Chesley Bonestell, Robert McCall, Ron Miller, and Pat Morrison (whose works can be found in the Museum’s collection).

The 1977 Barbarella poster was only one of Vallejo’s commercial successes in science fiction and fantasy art. When the first Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, was released in 1980, Vallejo was commissioned by the Coca-Cola Company to produce a series of tie-in posters featuring characters and scenes from the movie, available with purchase at Burger Chef restaurants. Throughout the 1980s, he also painted cover art for Star Trek paperback novels. His art appeared on at least nineteen Star Trek novels, including Vonda N. McIntyre’s novelization of the 1982 movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Just focusing on Vallejo’s science fiction bona fides provides a very incomplete view of his work and its influence on popular culture. To name just a few examples of the notable projects that feature Vallejo’s work, he painted cover art for Mad Magazine, was responsible for the posters for the National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983) and European Vacation (1985) movies, and, with wife and artistic partner Julie Bell, created art for a Maxim Magazine article featuring Jack Black’s rock duo, Tenacious D.