The Pirambu School
Chico da Silva's studio in Pirambu, Fortaleza: the five disciples, the work divided by stage, the parallel workshops and the collective panel of 1977.
In 1963 Chico da Silva left the Museu de Arte da Universidade Federal do Ceará, where he had painted since 1961, and went back to working at home in Pirambu. The neighbourhood, on the western shore of Fortaleza, was dunes and wattle-and-daub houses, settled by people fleeing the droughts of 1932 and 1958, and on the first day of 1962 its residents had marched to the city centre to demand land and a decent life. Chico’s house stood on Rua Santa Inês, and the buyers followed him there: tourists, middlemen and Henrique Bluhm, a German opera singer whom Jean-Pierre Chabloz had introduced to him and who became his first dealer. Orders soon outran what one hand could deliver. Roberto Galvão, in his monograph Chico da Silva e a Escola do Pirambu (1986), dates the first helpers to late 1963 or early 1964: boys from the nearby streets who had already been stopping to watch the painter work. What they painted went out signed “F. D. Silva”, and the group became known as the Escola do Pirambu, the Pirambu School. The painter’s own road, from Acre to this house, is told in his biography.
Five kids from the neighbourhood
The volume edited by the curator Flávia Muluc in 2024, for the exhibition “Escola do Pirambu: Um legado de Chico da Silva”, names the original core: five young people aged between 12 and 18 when they started, Babá (Sebastião Lima da Silva), Claudionor (José Claudionor Nogueira), Garcia (José dos Santos Gomes), Ivan (Ivan José de Assis) and Chica (Francisca Silva), the painter’s daughter. Galvão sees two ways in. Some had never handled art and came for the master’s work or for his prestige; others already drew. All of them lived nearby.
Galvão admits that nobody knows for sure who came first, but he points to Claudionor as the likely first to draw. At eight he was drawing film heroes in charcoal on the pavement outside his house when Chico, passing by, began bringing him sheets of card and ordering animals, paid for in comic books and small change. In the memoir he dictated in 2010, Claudionor says he was already drawing for Chico to fill in during the museum years. Galvão adds two pieces of evidence: Ivan remembered Chico arriving with pads of paper already drawn, in a line just like Claudionor’s, and the restorer Gilberto Brito recognised Claudionor’s composition in two works in the university museum’s collection.
Babá met Chico in the commotion of a press visit to the house. His father ran a shoemaking workshop and wanted him there, but the boy spent his days watching the painter, and he was the first to lay a hand on the painting, starting with the fill. Ivan, a neighbour who had known Chico before he was famous, was drawing creatures from Hollywood films on Greek mythology when he was asked in: he began by drawing, moved on to the flat colours that served as the base for the master’s stippling, and by 1964 was stippling too. Garcia, a nickname Chico himself gave him, lived in the house behind, yard against yard. He was about twelve in 1964 and came home from school around five in the afternoon and went straight to the drawings, until the painter asked whether he wanted to learn. Chica started at ten and told how: “Papa painted card on the wall. One day he told me I should learn his trade.” Her first picture took about five days; her father sold it for a hundred cruzeiros and gave her thirty, and she bought a dress.
A day in the house on Rua Santa Inês
Gilberto Brito, who lived nearby and spent time at the house as a young man, described the routine to Galvão. Around eight or nine in the morning Chico pinned five or six drawings to the wall with shoemaker’s tacks, ready to be painted, and always had others in reserve, drawn by him or by the helpers. Orders went first to Claudionor, “the school’s official draughtsman, so to speak”, in Garcia’s words: Chico handed over the card and the canvases, said which animals he wanted, and Claudionor wrote it all down in a little list. Galvão records how the first group divided the work. Claudionor, Ivan and, rarely, Chico himself drew; Babá, Ivan and Garcia did the enchimento, as they called the laying in of flat colour, and the pigmentação, the stippling; Chico did the finish, gave the picture a coat of varnish with a flit pump, signed it and sold it in person. Newcomers climbed in the same order: first filling inside the drawn line, then stippling, and only then animals of their own. They painted Monday to Saturday, Claudionor says.
Chico gave his directions out loud: “hold it like this”, “look at the drawing”, “fill it like this”, “I want this part green”, Garcia remembers, and in time Chico trusted each of them with a whole picture, start to finish, and the freedom to invent. The sociologist Gerciane Oliveira, who interviewed surviving members of the group, describes a workshop with no fixed hours or days and tasks that overlapped; the exception was Claudionor, the draughtsman. The master’s hand did not blend with the others. Garcia says Claudionor’s line came out perfect and that Chico, when filling in, ran the paint past it: “That was Chico all right, the one who painted outside the line.” Gilberto Brito describes the gesture: the brush dipped in two or three paints at once, pressed so the thick paint would take on the card, and a dot where a brushstroke would be. Under a lens, he says, any patch of a Chico shows two or three colours mixed at random.
The materials followed the orders. The gouache went onto card already pinned to the wall, and the liquid paint called for control and forethought, Muluc notes. The duplex board came from the decorator Breno Albuquerque, for whom Chico worked briefly after leaving the museum; Claudionor cut each sheet in two to get more drawings out of it, and the group also used brown kraft paper. Chico went as far as painting clay jars, plates and basins, plywood and hardboard. Canvas came later, through the parallel workshops.
Everyone was paid for the work. Garcia told Galvão he was paid from the start, when he only filled in, and Gilberto Brito that Chico never fell behind: with no cash on hand he opened credit at the neighbourhood’s corner shops and grocers, and the pay could turn into groceries or even a painting. Gilberto Lee, who grew up on Rua Santa Terezinha, remembers that the local kids knew when Chico had sold a picture, because he shared out part of the money: “I did a lot of little dots, but I was never his disciple.” The food was everyone’s too. Claudionor tells of Chico buying every chicken the vendor had and sending Dona Dalva to put the pot on the fire: “Get the kids’ lunch going, Chica, Claudionor, Babá, Garcia and Ivan, because the kids are working.”
The studio worked in hiding. Chico sold at his own door and did not want the buyers to know about the workshop: when a client’s car pulled up, the helpers jumped the back fence of the yard. Sometimes he sent everyone home to paint, Garcia says, for fear that reporters would turn up and catch the group at work. Dona Dalva gave at least one newcomer a cold welcome. On the day Gilberto Brito first sat down to stipple, she came out from inside and said: “Well, the painter really has no luck. Here’s one more.”
What each hand brought
Chico supplied the universe: fish, birds, dragons, animals in combat. The group widened it, and the master accepted whatever fitted the theme; “whatever we suggested and made up, he liked”, Garcia says. Claudionor settled fixed types with a defined drawing, their own features and their own names, and brought the human figure into the pictures; according to the critic Estrigas, quoted by Galvão, he took the first dragons from the alligator printed on cans of Querosene Jacaré. Ivan brought the winged creatures of the Greco-Roman mythology films, which Chico himself took up in the pictures he painted on his own in 1970, Oliveira records. The rooster came from the buyers, who asked for something like Aldemir Martins’s roosters, then printed on a line of Goyana china. Ivan drew the first one from the cover of a school exercise book, Claudionor drew others at Chico’s request, and from then on everyone who painted a cockfight worked over one of the two men’s drawings, some cutting the drawing out to use as a stencil. Then came egrets, jacanas, fighting snakes, owls, butterflies, flowers and insects.
Galvão also credits the mandala forms to Babá, the rosettes to Chica, the black grounds to Soldadinho, a painter known only by his nickname, and the monochrome gradient to Raimundo Neto. The black ground stayed because it sold, Garcia says. Babá’s painting became the yardstick for the whole school. Nobody set out to imitate him, Galvão writes: “his painting was simply the most beautiful”, and some ranked it above the master’s.
Galvão reads the result as a different kind of painting. The school lost the poetic charge of Chico’s first gouaches and gained values of urban, popular origin: the stippling grew colder, closer to a printer’s halftone; the colour went after harsher, more aggressive harmonies; the subject became almost solely the struggle to survive. He sets Pirambu beside the pop art of London and New York in the same years, where artists appropriated other people’s images and hired others to execute them, and concludes: “Once again painting was being reinvented, but this time we had no other Chabloz to notice.” David Silberstein, who studied the circuit in 1977, noted a paradox. A leading figure of Fortaleza’s cultural elite had advised in a newspaper that anyone who wanted a Chico should lock the painter up for two or three days with the materials; many of the most “original” creations after 1963, Silberstein wrote, had been made in Pirambu with the disciples’ help. By Galvão’s count, ninety per cent of what circulates with Chico’s signature came out of the school, because by the time this kind of picture became popular the team was already in place.
The workshops outside the house
Henrique Bluhm discovered the arrangement on a surprise visit, Galvão writes: he found Chico drunk and the helpers painting. He wanted to take him to work outside Pirambu, and Chico refused, because he had buyers who came to his door. The answer was to take Babá instead. Bluhm ran a snack bar in the city centre, one of the first places in Fortaleza to serve pizza, popular with university students, and at the back of it Babá painted, Bluhm’s wife Di Caura helped, and Chico came by at the end of the day to sign. It was the first parallel workshop, opened in 1965 according to Galvão. Claudionor also sold Bluhm sheets of drawn-up duplex board, which Chico and Babá coloured. The workshop broke up after Dalva, Chico’s wife, reported fake paintings in a Rio exhibition to the Fortaleza police in 1966. Babá did not go back to the master’s house: he tried a solo show at the Casa de Cultura Raimundo Cela, without success, and set up his own workshop in Pirambu, with helpers of his own.
The second workshop, Maurício Xerez’s, opened in 1967 with Ivan doing everything, from the drawing to the stippling. It was there that canvas came in, because it was quicker to execute and fetched more than card. Chico posed beside the pictures for photographs that served as proof of authenticity and turned up at the exhibition openings; Ivan remembered Xerez repeating “After me, the Deluge”. The third, Valentin Mickaliuck’s, bought card from Chico that had only been drawn, probably by Claudionor, and paid a commercial sign painter to colour it. A workshop was not even needed: Claudionor says the dealer Pompeu Braga bought pictures from him and Chico signed them, and that all the dealers did the same. Silberstein described the mechanism: the dealers began dealing directly with the disciples, who accepted less than Chico charged, and Chico was often paid for the signature alone.
High-resolution viewer. Use the arrow keys to pan, plus and minus to zoom.
The school spread through the neighbourhood. Chico replaced departing helpers with new children, and people who had never set eyes on him began painting in his manner; it is of this moment that Galvão writes, “the Pirambu School is established”. Efimia Rôla, who followed the painters in the 1970s, remembers that every grocery in the neighbourhood sold card, gouache and brushes. In May 1975 the Tribuna do Ceará ran “Pirambu: todos pintam ‘Chico da Silva’” (Pirambu: everyone paints “Chico da Silva”) on its front page, with an estimate of five hundred people living off these pictures. Galvão’s monograph ends with a roll of twenty-seven people who painted Chicos da Silva: the five, Maria Augusta, Gilberto Brito himself, Di Caura, two of Babá’s brothers (Manuel and Cainha), Chico’s son Roberto, a grandson, a stepson, Raimundo Neto and a string of nicknames, Chico Carabina, Viuvinha, Soldadinho, José Boneco, Chiquinho do Conjunto. In 1972 Chico had told the journalist Luiz Ernesto Kawall that he recognised only two pupils, his daughter Chica and Manuel, “son of Raimundo, the shoemaker here in Pirambu”, whom he had raised from a small boy.
The core did not stay together through the decade. In 1968, at the request of the painter Heloísa Juaçaba, of the State Council of Culture, the Ceará government blocked an exhibition of Xerez’s in the foyer of the Theatro José de Alencar, and Galvão dates the start of the decline from there. In 1969 came the case of Maria Augusta, a fifteen-year-old girl who said she was the author of pictures Chico had signed, and Chabloz nicknamed the studio “Chico da Silva Picture Factory Ltd.”; the scandal and the market that fed it are told in The painting factory. Muluc places the group’s pause around 1969. Claudionor dates to mid-1971 the arrival of Dão, a former shoemaker from Pirambu who got into Chico’s business through his friendship with Dalva: the disciples drifted away, and canvases painted in a hurry filled the city. Garcia left for São Paulo in 1973, because what the studio paid was not enough to live on.
1977: the painters sign their own names
In 1977 a study group, “Chico da Silva e a Escola do Pirambu”, formed in Fortaleza: the physician and artist Hélio Rôla, who taught at the Federal University of Ceará’s medical school; Gilberto Brito, a restorer, who had painted in the studio; and the political scientist David Silberstein, educated at Harvard and Yale, who lived in the city from 1974 to 1978. They met at the Rôlas’ house on Praia de Iracema, and it was the group, Efimia Rôla recalls, that began calling the studio the Escola do Pirambu, a name the press took badly. Silberstein interviewed Claudionor and Babá, and the group published the booklet Patrimônio Popular 1: Os Pintores do Pirambu, the only issue of a planned series, for the third Exanor fair, held from 11 to 20 March. There the five exhibited under their own names. The Correio do Ceará wrote that they belonged “to a school of painting created instinctively by the painter Chico da Silva, and are not copiers of his creativity”, and the critic Frederico Morais, in O Globo, saw in the show “the first public manifestation of a stance that could lead to a review of the case of Chico da Silva”. Silberstein counted exactly that as the group’s first result: the painters began signing their own pictures.
High-resolution viewer. Use the arrow keys to pan, plus and minus to zoom.
In April, at the 27th Salão de Abril, Hélio Rôla entered Homens Trabalhando (Men at Work) in the conceptual art category: the five would paint a panel live, in front of the public. The proposal was accepted outside the competition, which took only finished work. Chico was in hospital with cirrhosis, and Rôla, as a physician, obtained permission to take him to the show every day and bring him back at the end of each session. The school was no longer producing together, and most of its members had other jobs; they fitted their work around the seven days of the panel, four metres by two, painted in white coats with each one’s name written on the back. Silberstein described Chico “with the baton”: he drew the figures first, signalled to Claudionor to complete the drawings and then to the others to come in with the colours, and returned from time to time to paint beside them, like “a small orchestra”. At the end, he signed it. Marcus and João Vale photographed the work and filmed it in Super 8, and they also recorded the canvas’s journey through the streets to the university. “That was what brought Chico’s school out of that anonymity,” Garcia says.
High-resolution viewer. Use the arrow keys to pan, plus and minus to zoom.
High-resolution viewer. Use the arrow keys to pan, plus and minus to zoom.
In July the group took the case to the 29th meeting of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science (SBPC). The meeting had been scheduled for Fortaleza; the dictatorship pushed it out of the city and also barred it from the University of São Paulo, and it ended up at the Catholic University in São Paulo, where the group showed the booklet, the film and the photographs. Aracy Amaral, director of the Pinacoteca do Estado, invited them to repeat the presentation at the museum, the first time the subject was debated in an art institution, according to the curator Paulo Portella Filho. Still in 1977, the São Paulo Biennial turned down the Homens Trabalhando proposal, and the mistrust between Chico and his former collaborators, and among them, above all between Chico’s children and the others, outlasted the effort, Silberstein admitted. In 1979, steered by the “nephew and niece” Margarida and Ramires, Chico began denying in the press that the school existed. That same year, before a research stay in France, Hélio Rôla commissioned the five to paint on paper and sign in their own names, supplying good materials and paying more than the Mercado Central did, and took the set to an exhibition in Paris.
The panel found no buyer. With no offer from the state government or the state tourism company, Rôla left it in provisional safekeeping at a library on the university’s Pici campus, which later refused to give it back. A 2021 petition with more than two hundred signatures, and a dossier that Muluc, Rôla and Garcia took to the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office in 2022, ended in an agreement, and in 2023 the panel entered the collection of the Museu de Arte da UFC, the same museum where Chico had worked in the early 1960s.
After 1985
Chico died in Fortaleza on 6 December 1985. Two days later the Diário do Nordeste named the five painters of the 1977 group in full. Part of the core painted together again from about 2004, when Claudionor got back in touch with Garcia and Babá and the three began painting for the Instituto Cultural Oboé, owned by the businessman Newton Freitas; that commission is told in Instituto Oboé. Ivan died in 2003, and Claudionor in 2010. Garcia is the only one of the five still alive, and he still paints in Ceará.
High-resolution viewer. Use the arrow keys to pan, plus and minus to zoom.
In the 2020s the studio moved back to the centre of how Chico is read. In 2023 the Pinacoteca de São Paulo staged “Chico da Silva e o ateliê do Pirambu”, curated by Thierry Freitas, and the show travelled to the Pinacoteca do Ceará as “Chico da Silva e a Escola do Pirambu”. Freitas wrote that the large, mural-like works are good precisely because they were made by a group, with different techniques. In 2024, at the Centro Cultural Belchior, “Escola do Pirambu: Um legado de Chico da Silva” showed works by the five painted between 1973 and 1984, from Hélio Rôla’s collection, and gave rise to Muluc’s volume. The road to those museums is told in legacy and rediscovery.
To anyone who asks what is Chico and what is not, Garcia answers that all of it is. There is what the master made with his own hand, at the start, and there is what was made in his house, under his direction and his watch: “it is no exaggeration to say that there, our hands were his hands too”. Gilberto Brito, who was asked many times “Is it Chico or isn’t it?”, gives the same answer today.
Double attribution in this collection
The João Cunha Collection keeps both hands in view. The acrylics that the Instituto Oboé commissioned in the 2000s from Babá, Claudionor and Gerardo da Silva are almost all catalogued under a double attribution, such as “Chico da Silva by Babá”; Babá’s canvases linked to this article date from 2005 and 2006. Gerardo, Chica’s son and the painter’s grandson, took first place at the 2004 Bienal Naïf, Oliveira’s thesis records. The canvases by Ivan, Maria Augusta and Garcia carry the name of whoever painted them, each in its own section of the paintings.
