The Painting Factory

How Chico da Silva's Fortaleza studio became a painting factory: mass production, forgeries and the disputed marks of the Pirambu School, 1966–1972.

The phrase came out of a newspaper column. In July 1969, closing a month of scandal, the critic José Roberto Teixeira Leite wrote in O Globo that Chico da Silva, according to the newspapers, had kept a true painting factory staffed with assistants, and reminded readers that Rubens and Caravaggio ran workshops too. Between 1966 and 1972 that factory in Fortaleza, Ceará, supplied a national market with dragons, birds and fish, and produced the questions that still follow every canvas signed Chico da Silva.

A market bigger than one hand

The trouble was public before the glory. In February 1966 the Jornal do Brasil reported a denunciation by the painter himself: works sold under his name at the Relevo gallery in Rio were fakes, commissioned by the dealer Henrique Bluhm from the painter Babá, who had reportedly admitted to forty of them. Bluhm answered in the same article that most paintings signed Chico da Silva were the work of assistants anyway, the master adding little beyond the signature. Four months later came the honourable mention at the 33rd Venice Biennale, and with it more demand than one hand could meet.

How the volume was organized is reconstructed in the doctoral thesis of the sociologist Gerciane Oliveira (2015): dealers ordered lots of fifty to eighty paintings from the young painters around Chico, and when a lot was done he came by the workshop to sign it. Jean-Pierre Chabloz, who had first presented Chico’s work in the 1940s, gave his own account in 1969, in an interview picked up by the Jornal do Brasil: commissions rose until the painter worked day and night, then hired helpers; Chico, his discoverer confirmed, had created an industry of paintings. By March 1977 the Correio do Ceará put the trade at two to three thousand works a month in Fortaleza and counted some three thousand apocryphal paintings seized by the Federal Police at the stalls of the old public jail market. A year earlier the Jornal do Brasil (1976) had run the arithmetic the other way: whoever owned a Chico da Silva painted after 1972 owned, in nine cases out of ten, a fake.

Scale changed the pictures themselves. The gouache on card of the 1950s and 60s gave way to canvas and acrylic from about 1970 on, a shift documented in the list of dated works Oliveira published in 2023. In February 1972 O Globo was still announcing a show of the painter’s gouaches at a Copacabana gallery, timed for the tourist season. And one change has a witness: the black background. Garcia, one of the Pirambu School painters, is quoted in the 2024 collection A Escola do Pirambu: um legado de Chico da Silva (organized by Flávia Muluc) saying the black ground entered the repertoire because it sold well. A second version, which credits the invention to Chica, the painter’s daughter, remains a hypothesis; no document confirms it.

The girl who painted dragons

On 18 June 1969 O Globo put the case on its front page under the headline “The fish test.” Maria Augusta, a fifteen-year-old neighbour of Chico’s in Pirambu, had accused him of taking her paintings, signing them and selling them at high prices. Challenged, she sat at an easel in a newspaper office in Fortaleza and painted dragons, fish and birds in the style that had made him famous. He repelled the accusation, called it an ignominy, and held that his own manner was unmistakable.

In August O Cruzeiro carried her account in the first person. Chico had seen her drawing at her window in 1965 and asked her to come work with him; from then on, she told the magazine, her paintings were sold and she never smelled the money. The same report records the sequel: he challenged her to paint beside him on television, and missed the appointment; she went. The magazine also presented Chico, in the words of its own headline, as a possible victim of a commercial structure that threatened his survival. Nine years later Arte Hoje (1978) gave Maria Augusta a single line of epilogue: tubercular and destitute.

Marks against the flood

Against the copies, the studio accumulated marks: the pencil under-drawing beneath the paint, the thumbprint set under the signature. The painter listed them to the Correio do Ceará in 1979, adding that he sold only at home, at the Pinto Martins airport and through one gallery in Brasília. The print was already part of the story in 1969, when Maria Augusta told O Cruzeiro she had recognized paintings of hers signed by Chico with fingerprint and all.

The strangest claim about those marks appeared in March 1978 in Arte Hoje (“Um índio reinventa a pintura,” by André Papi). A photograph shows the painter holding up his thumb; the caption states that a reversed S was tattooed on it at a medical school, and that with it he stamped works of his own and works by others. No other source in the record repeats the tattoo, and A Tribuna of Santos printed a different version in 1979, an F worked into the finger. What the record holds is a claim published in 1978, photograph included, with no corroboration since. The same article said plainly that Chico’s signature went onto the disciples’ paintings “for valorization,” and that nobody, least of all the painter, ever made a secret of the arrangement.

What the factory years left

The end of the boom has a date in print. Chico’s paintings had found a firm market until 1972, the Correio do Ceará wrote in 1979, before the first forgers confused the public. Two years earlier the same paper had welcomed an exhibition of the Pirambu painters under their own names, Babá, Claudionor, Francisca (who signs as Chica), Garcia and Ivan, as an occasion to put popular art before the public. And in the same 1979 report that listed his marks of authenticity, Chico stated that even Chica was faking his paintings. The paradox stays open here; how the question reached the museums and the market of the 2020s is told in legacy and rediscovery.

What remains is the painting. The João Cunha Collection holds works from exactly these years, among them Dragons (1971), an acrylic on canvas, and Cockfight (1972), a gouache that carries both the signature and the thumbprint, the marks around which the whole dispute turned. The life that runs through the factory years, from the naïve art first noticed on the walls of Praia Formosa to the international circuit, is told in the painter’s biography.