---
title: "Cataloguing Chico da Silva: What a Catalogue Raisonné Has to Resolve: Chico da Silva"
description: "At Pirambu, disciples painted and the master signed. What that asks of a catalogue raisonné of Chico da Silva, from the signature to the double attribution."
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---

# Cataloguing Chico da Silva: What a Catalogue Raisonné Has to Resolve

At Pirambu, disciples painted and the master signed. What that asks of a catalogue raisonné of Chico da Silva, from the signature to the double attribution.

A catalogue raisonné records an artist’s works one by one: what each piece is, when it was made, who owned it, where it was shown and where it appeared in print. For most painters, the hard part is finding the canvases. With Chico da Silva, another question comes first: whose hand is in each one. At Pirambu, disciples painted and the master signed, and in July 1969 the critic José Roberto Teixeira Leite wrote in *O Globo* that, according to the newspapers, he kept a true painting factory.

## What goes into an entry

*Raisonné* is French for reasoned. Each entry gives the attribution, the date and the history of the work, and says what it rests on for each of those claims. An entry usually carries a number, title, date, technique, support, dimensions, inscriptions and signature, the chain of owners, and the exhibitions and literature in which the work appears. A collection catalogue does the same for what sits in one collection, and an exhibition catalogue for what hung in one show. A catalogue raisonné tries to cover the whole body of work. In Brazil, the Projeto Portinari published Portinari’s in 2004: five volumes, with 4,991 paintings, drawings and prints.

## A workshop with many hands

In the same column, Teixeira Leite reminded readers that Rubens and Caravaggio also ran workshops. At Pirambu, the work was split by stage. According to Roberto Galvão, quoted in the collected volume *A Escola do Pirambu: um legado de Chico da Silva* (ed. Flávia Muluc, 2024), Ivan and Claudionor drew the outlines, Garcia, Babá and Chica filled the fields of colour, and Chico kept the finishing, the corrections, the varnish, the signature and the sale. The restorer Gilberto Brito, who spent part of his youth in the studio, recalls in the documentary *Memória e Imaginário* (2024) that Chico repainted whatever fell short of his standard. Not even the animals came from a single head: Garcia told Flávia Muluc in 2023 that the roosters started as requests from buyers, and that Ivan drew the first one from the cover of a school exercise book.

A finished canvas can therefore carry one disciple’s drawing, two others’ colour, and Chico’s finishing and signature, with nothing on the surface to show where one hand stopped and the next began. Outside his house, the count gets harder. Canvas came in through the parallel workshops, because it sold for more (Galvão, 1986), and in 1979 Chico himself told the *Correio do Ceará* that in Loiro dos Santos alone, in Pirambu, three families turned out some 160 paintings a week. Galvão’s estimate, taken up in the 2024 volume, is that about 90% of the works in circulation came out of the [school](https://chicodasilva.org/en/pirambu-school/).

A few weeks before Teixeira Leite’s column, in June 1969, [Maria Augusta](https://chicodasilva.org/en/articles/maria-augusta-the-girl-who-signed/), then fifteen, told a Fortaleza newspaper that canvases sold with Chico’s signature were hers. The João Cunha Collection holds a canvas she painted and signed with her own name in 1973.

[![A large fantastic fish in profile, its dark body stippled with spirals and marked by three eye-like discs. Fantastic Fish, Maria Augusta, 1973, gouache on canvas.](https://img.chicodasilva.org/jcc-084/maria-augusta-fantastic-fish-1973-gouache-on-canvas-40x60cm-joao-cunha-collection-jcc-084-chicodasilva.org-640.jpg)](https://chicodasilva.org/en/paintings/fantastic-fish-1973-084/)

*[Fantastic Fish (1973)](https://chicodasilva.org/en/paintings/fantastic-fish-1973-084/), Maria Augusta*

## Garcia’s criterion

For Garcia, the last painter of the core group still alive, the question has an answer. In the 2024 documentary he says that whatever was painted in Chico’s house, under his eye and with his signature, is Chico’s: “at that moment, the school is Chico.” It is a workshop criterion, and the routine Garcia describes supports it: at the start, he says, it was Chico who pointed to where the blue went and where the red went. He reads the press of those years as an attempt to bring the painter down.

The criterion is also the most contested point in any catalogue of Chico, because of the painter’s situation in the years when it matters most. In June 1976, *O Povo* wrote that Chico had given up painting in 1970, when he began simply signing pictures in exchange for small change; a month earlier, his son Carlos Roberto had told the same paper that his father’s last painting dated from 1974. That year, Chico was admitted to hospital with cirrhosis, went through intensive care and, in September, was taken to a clinic with a diagnosis of alcoholic psychosis, which he left only in August 1977 (Galvão, *Do delírio ao dilúvio*). With the painter in hospital, “under his eye” no longer describes what went on in the workshop, and the signature, which settles the matter under Garcia’s criterion, is what *O Povo* said he was selling for small change.

The dispute went public in 1978, with people on both sides. Friar Antônio da Memória, the painter Heloísa Juaçaba and Gilberto Brito held that for some five years Chico had not produced a picture entirely his own; the dealer Dão and the painter’s children denied it (Oliveira, 2017). The wish to separate out what is his also dates from then: at the end of 1976, artists and intellectuals launched a movement for a foundation to guard the painter’s name, with plans to catalogue the authentic works by number (*O Povo*, 19 December 1976; *O Estado de S. Paulo*, 19 February 1977). A catalogue raisonné of Chico has to decide whether it adopts Garcia’s criterion, for which years and with what reservations, and say so in the entry for each canvas.

## A scale for authorship

Old master painting already has a vocabulary for the workshop. Auction catalogues grade attribution: the painter’s name alone, “studio of”, “circle of”, “follower of”, “manner of”. The Rembrandt Research Project, begun in 1968, sorted paintings into three categories: A, accepted as Rembrandt’s; B, those it could neither accept nor reject; C, those it rejected.

Chico’s market built its own scale. Gerciane Oliveira’s thesis (2015) records four statuses: the picture made entirely by him, the one made with assistance, the one made by the assistants and signed by him, and the one made and signed by the assistants. In the 1970s, according to Oliveira (2017), lots were sorted into fake, “half-fake” and genuine; today, galleries price from the “pure Chico da Silva” to the “Escola do Pirambu” painting (Oliveira, 2023). Any catalogue that sets out to cover Chico’s work will have to choose a scale like these, or make its own, and apply it work by work with the reasons in plain view.

## Marks that were copied too

Against the copies, the studio piled up marks of authorship (Oliveira, 2017). There was the pencil drawing under the paint. The signature gained the extended F underlining the name and, beside it, the thumbprint pressed into the paint. Then came certificates registered with a notary and the signature witnessed on the back of the canvas. The 1972 *Cockfight* in this collection, gouache on canvas, carries the signature, the thumbprint and the pencil under the paint.

[![Two ornately patterned roosters facing off over a leafy branch, bordered by a wavy marbled band. Cockfight, Chico da Silva, 1972, gouache on canvas.](https://img.chicodasilva.org/jcc-074/chico-da-silva-cockfight-1972-gouache-on-canvas-60x100cm-joao-cunha-collection-jcc-074-chicodasilva.org-640.jpg)](https://chicodasilva.org/en/paintings/cockfight-1972-074/)

*[Cockfight (1972)](https://chicodasilva.org/en/paintings/cockfight-1972-074/), Chico da Silva*

None of these marks held up as proof. In 1972, Kawall was already describing fake canvases sold at hotel doors with the “reversed D” signature and the thumb stamp; in 1977, Lélia Coelho Frota wrote about the “supposed fingerprint” on paintings the painter did not execute. A year before that, the *Jornal do Brasil* had done the arithmetic: whoever owned a Chico da Silva painted after 1972 owned, in nine cases out of ten, a fake. The story is told in [The Painting Factory](https://chicodasilva.org/en/articles/painting-factory/).

So a mark on its own settles little. The entry has to add the chain of owners to it, the first time the work appeared in an exhibition or on a printed page, and the material: gouache on card gave way to canvas and acrylic around 1970, a shift that Oliveira’s list of dated works (2023) documents.

## After 1985

Chico died in Fortaleza on 6 December 1985, and the school carried on. Between 2004 and 2011, the [Instituto Oboé](https://chicodasilva.org/en/articles/instituto-oboe/) brought Babá, Claudionor and Gerardo da Silva, the painter’s grandson, back to the canvas, and each signed his own name. [Garcia](https://chicodasilva.org/en/articles/garcia-the-last-disciple/) still paints today. These canvases fall outside a catalogue of Chico’s work by any criterion of date, and inside a catalogue of the Pirambu School by any criterion of language. Where to draw the line is one more decision a catalogue has to state in its introduction.

[![A large scaled dragon with a long spotted tail against a yellow ground. Dragon Birds Fish and Snake, Chico da Silva by Babá, 2006, acrylic on canvas.](https://img.chicodasilva.org/jcc-045/chico-da-silva-by-baba-dragon-birds-fish-and-snake-2006-acrylic-on-canvas-74x99cm-joao-cunha-collection-jcc-045-chicodasilva.org-640.jpg)](https://chicodasilva.org/en/paintings/dragon-birds-fish-and-snake-2006-045/)

*[Dragon Birds Fish and Snake (2006)](https://chicodasilva.org/en/paintings/dragon-birds-fish-and-snake-2006-045/), Chico da Silva by Babá*

## How this collection does it

The [João Cunha Collection](https://chicodasilva.org/en/about/) uses the catalogue raisonné entry as the model for the paintings it holds. Each [painting](https://chicodasilva.org/en/paintings/) has its technique, support and dimensions and, when the canvas is signed, the signature as it reads, with a photograph of the detail that also shows the thumbprint when there is one. Provenance goes in when it is known. The disciples’ canvases carry a double attribution, “Chico da Silva por Babá”, which names the master and the painter without deciding where one hand ends and the other begins. And every work has a permanent address, in the form `/id/jcc-074`, to be cited in a thesis, an article or another catalogue.

## Related works

-   [![Two ornately patterned roosters facing off over a leafy branch, bordered by a wavy marbled band. Cockfight, Chico da Silva, 1972, gouache on canvas.](https://img.chicodasilva.org/jcc-074/chico-da-silva-cockfight-1972-gouache-on-canvas-60x100cm-joao-cunha-collection-jcc-074-chicodasilva.org-640.jpg)Cockfight Chico da Silva, 1972](https://chicodasilva.org/en/paintings/cockfight-1972-074/)
-   [![Two confronting horned dragons with scaly bodies, fanned fins and gaping toothy jaws on a yellow ground. Dragons, Chico da Silva, 1971, acrylic on canvas.](https://img.chicodasilva.org/jcc-016/chico-da-silva-dragons-1971-acrylic-on-canvas-64x80cm-joao-cunha-collection-jcc-016-chicodasilva.org-640.jpg)Dragons Chico da Silva, 1971](https://chicodasilva.org/en/paintings/dragons-1971-016/)
-   [![A large fantastic fish in profile, its dark body stippled with spirals and marked by three eye-like discs. Fantastic Fish, Maria Augusta, 1973, gouache on canvas.](https://img.chicodasilva.org/jcc-084/maria-augusta-fantastic-fish-1973-gouache-on-canvas-40x60cm-joao-cunha-collection-jcc-084-chicodasilva.org-640.jpg)Fantastic Fish Maria Augusta, 1973](https://chicodasilva.org/en/paintings/fantastic-fish-1973-084/)
-   [![A large scaled dragon with a long spotted tail against a yellow ground. Dragon Birds Fish and Snake, Chico da Silva by Babá, 2006, acrylic on canvas.](https://img.chicodasilva.org/jcc-045/chico-da-silva-by-baba-dragon-birds-fish-and-snake-2006-acrylic-on-canvas-74x99cm-joao-cunha-collection-jcc-045-chicodasilva.org-640.jpg)Dragon Birds Fish and Snake Chico da Silva by Babá, 2006](https://chicodasilva.org/en/paintings/dragon-birds-fish-and-snake-2006-045/)