Arts & Culture III

The legacy of a passionate Outlook

Physician and art critic Clarival do Prado Valladares led a remarkable life. He would have been 90 in September

written by: Carmen Lucia Azevedo

If he were alive today, Clarival do Prado Valladares would have celebrated his 90th birthday on September 26, 2008. Unfortunately, he died 25 years ago, in 1983, leaving the Brazilian art world orphaned and sad. The purpose of this essay is to shed light on part of his brilliant and unique career and acquaint today’s generation with the legacy of a Bahian who, despite his frail health, bequeathed a legacy of art and architecture for Brazil.

His name is now well known in this country thanks to two major annual events. One is the award created in 2003 by the Odebrecht Group, which selects one project per year from among hundreds submitted by scholars of Brazilian culture and publishes it in the form of an illustrated book produced with the highest editorial and graphic standards. The other is the competition organized by the Brazilian Art Critics’ Association, which has named one of its categories after him. He is also its patron.

But how many Brazilians are truly familiar with the biography of this physician specialized in Pathology who was so passionate about Brazilian esthetics and their role in the arts of the nation in general and the Northeast in particular?

Clarival was born on September 26, 1918, at 81, Poeira St., in the city of Salvador. He was the second child of Clarice Santos Silva Valladares and Antônio do Prado Valladares, a renowned doctor in that city who was also a professor of Medicine at the Bahia Medical School. His Christian name came from the loving way his mother signed her notes to her husband.

Together with José, his older brother and the first-born son of the Prado Valladares family, Clarival moved to the city of Recife when he was still a child. The boys were sent away as a painful but preventive measure because their father was fighting with tuberculosis. They received a warm welcome from Ulysses Pernambucano, a psychiatrist who was a friend of their father. He took the boys in and raised them along with his own sons, Jarbas and José Antônio.

While in Recife, Clarival and José finished secondary school and went on to university. José, who was interested in journalism, studied Law, while Clarival followed in his father’s footsteps by going to medical school and concluding his studies in Bahia. Like his father, Clarival learned to speak German fluently so he could read the most advanced scientific literature available.

Reading and discoveries
All those years away from their family became a period of extraordinary discoveries that shaped the brothers’ intellectual development. They studied the classics, broadened their horizons and became familiar with the most advanced debates and research of their time. Ulysses’ circle of family and friends brought them into contact with intellectuals who were at the height of their productive powers, such as Joaquim Cardozo, Cícero Dias, Gilberto Freyre and Roberto Burle Marx, who in 1934 became the Director of Parks and Gardens in Recife, and was a close friend of Clarival, although he was nine years older.

The influence of that group of talented friends gave the Prado Valladares brothers a taste for eclecticism, which was responsible for their outstanding contributions to the Brazilian art world. For Clarival, that became accentuated while doing research under the direction of Gilberto Freyre, whom he helped study living conditions on Joaneiro Island, an area where people lived in stilt houses on the Capiberibe estuary. That research led to the publication of The Mansions and the Shanties in 1936, a work that quickly became a classic.

In 1939, having returned to Salvador after his father died – he passed away in the Correias TB Sanitarium in the mountains of Rio de Janeiro State – as fate would have it, Clarival crossed paths with Erica, a neighbor of German descent, who later became his wife. Erica was the daughter of Emílio Odebrecht, and had a strong appreciation for her German heritage, was well as the artistic expressions of her native land, Brazil. The arts and letters brought them together through a German tutor. These soul mates shared an unrivalled passion for cultural expressions that also provided the basis for the fraternal and mutual confidence Clarival had in his father-in-law, which he describes in his preface to the fourth volume of Historic and Monumental Northeast.

The close relationship between the Prado Valladares and Odebrecht families gave rise to a partnership that would have many beneficial outcomes for the Brazilian publishing world. In 1959, Odebrecht launched a publishing program that has been producing cultural editions ever since. It now includes over 200 published titles, and for a long time, its mentor was Clarival do Prado Valladares. Today, the Group sponsors the highly competitive award bearing his name.

The first work published through this program nearly 50 years ago was titled Homage to Historic Bahia, and its author was José Valladares, who since 1939 had been giving fresh drive and dynamism to the Department of Museums and Monuments in Salvador, leading to the creation of the Bahia Museum of Art. In his preface, José advised his readers that “Any hard-working community in this world can have money and new buildings. Material witnesses to the past, however, cannot be built.”

With the help of his wife, Clarival Valladares divided his time between medicine and his passion for the widest range of creative expressions that the human spirit can produce. Erica was his constant companion who helped him from the very beginning in his unique research on the ex-votos of Bonfim Church for his doctorate in Medicine, later published under the title of Riscadores de Milagres (Miracle Sketchers). It was a controversial undertaking to defend a study of that nature as a medical dissertation.

However, Clarival truly was interested in studying pathologies. So much so that in the mid-1950s he traveled to the United States to take graduate courses in Pathology at Harvard University, and in Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Scientific observation of art
Clarival’s familiarity with slides and laboratories came in handy, not only in his profession but also in the field of aesthetics, where he applied scientific procedures to the observation of works of art. Patient and systematic, he developed a method of studying art works that was uniquely his own. He broke down each work into small parts and reproduced them photographically in order to study them in detail, point by point. This method enabled him to observe previously overlooked details that added essential meaning to the symbolic analysis of a work or artistic activity. Clarival used to say that “Nothing is random, nothing happens by chance, everything is symbolic.”

He studied an astonishing number and variety of subjects, including History, and the Arts and Architecture of a wide range of periods, including Brazil as a Portuguese colony, empire and republic. In his analyses, he focused on folk and erudite works by anonymous and known artists, as well as secular and religious art, the old and contemporary, individual and collective. His frail health did not prevent him from leaving behind a colossal body of work, ensuring him a place of honor among Brazilian art critics. At the Federal University at Bahia (UFBA), where he took a competitive exam to become a professor of Pathological Anatomy, he was also appointed to teach Art History by the School of Fine Arts faculty.

The most productive phase of Clarival’s life took place in Rio de Janeiro, where he moved in 1963 and spent the rest of his life. For many years, he penned his own column as an art critic for Jornal do Brasil, then one of the nation’s most influential newspapers. He ushered countless artists onto the national scene, some of whom he had followed virtually “from the cradle,” such as Emanoel Araújo, from Bahia.

He was a member of panels that selected artists from Brazil for the 32nd and 33rd Venice Biennials, held in 1964 and 1966. He was also a judge for several Brazilian exhibitions, including the São Paulo Biennial, and international events such as the III American Arts Biennial in Córdoba, Argentina, and the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, both in 1966. He was a member of the National Fine Arts Commission from 1964 to 1967.

Galeria Goeldi, one of Rio’s most famous modern art galleries, was his creation, and he ran it until the end of his life. He also mounted the Galeria Bnerj and played an outstanding role in two arts journals, GAM and Cadernos Brasileiros, as well as several public and private agencies and institutes, such as the National Historic and Artistic Heritage Service. In 1967, Clarival became a member of the Federal Arts Council.

In addition to his PhD dissertations and books of poetry – including two volumes of concrete poetry, published in 1959 and 1960 – Clarival left behind a vast bibliography. As an art critic, he published articles and essays in newspapers, magazines and specialized journals in Brazil and other countries. He wrote countless prefaces and introductions for books and catalogues on artists like Guignard, Djanira and Pancetti, among others, as well as the preface to a book on Pancetti, the seascape painter, by José Roberto Teixeira Leite, published in 1979. He also wrote the introduction to Artesanato Brasileiro (Brazilian Handicrafts), an initiative of the Funarte Foundation, published in 1978.

Erica do Prado Valladares: “Everything I’ve learned in life,
I learned from Clarival”


written by: Rogério Menezes


At the age of 86, Erica do Prado Valladares (whose husband’s nickname for her was “Tida”) displays a vivacity and youthful spirit rarely found in people of any age. Sitting in the study of her Guinle Park apartment in the Laranjeiras district of Rio de Janeiro, designed by architect Lúcio Costa in the late 40s, she describes the man she lived with for 42 years (she called him “Tidinho”): “Clarival do Prado Valladares opened himself up like a fan to everything. He knew how to gain a precise understanding of a varied range of subjects and conversed with everyone in the same way, with the same sense of respect, from the humblest to the most sophisticated. Everything I’ve learned in life, I learned from him. And I guarantee you, I’ve learned a lot.”

Landscape artist Roberto Burle Marx called Erica do Prado Valladares “Clarival’s feminine side.” According to their daughter, Kátia Valladares, she was also “my father’s co-author.” Both descriptions are accurate. But this youthful octogenarian may be much more than that. It could be that Clarival do Prado Valladares existed because an Erica do Prado Valladares was there to clear a path through the jungle. And vice versa.

Clarival – whose name is a combination of his mother’s name, Clarice, with the “Val” from Valladares, the surname of his father, Antonio – was the only thing that young Erica Odebrecht (the younger sister of Norberto and Gertha Odebrecht) was sure about at the age of 19. It was a decisive moment in her life when Clarival, recently graduated and living in Rio de Janeiro, came down with tuberculosis – then an incurable illness – and wrote to her explaining his situation and saying that he would not be able to give her the future she deserved. Érica didn’t hesitate. She asked her father to sell a piece of land he owned and used the money to travel from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro, where she married Clarival in a civil ceremony (they would only have a church wedding five years later, at the Benedictine Monastery in Salvador). He was 23 and she was 19.

“Fate had a gift in store for me”
Clarival do Prado Valladares always recognized the key role that his wife played in his life and work. In an essay in the guise of a résumé that he wrote for the catalogue for the “Selected Works” exhibition (held in Salvador, Recife, Rio and São Paulo in 1983, as a retrospective of the physician and historian’s personal and professional lives), he wrote: “Fate had a gift in store for me. It brought me Erica, from Pernambuco, who was willing to help me prepare a PhD dissertation based on the medical aspects of the miracles of Senhor do Bonfim.”

Clarival do Prado Valladares’s idea of juxtaposing science with one of the most symbolic signs of Bahian spirituality does not seem to have pleased his professors. In the same essay, he writes, without hesitation: “They told me not to start my life in the medical profession by exposing myself to ridicule – especially as I had inherited a great name in Bahian Medicine.”

But teachers can be wrong, and at the time, Clarival’s professors were completely in the wrong. The subject of his dissertation, which became the epicenter of his book Riscadores de Milagres (Sketchers of Miracles), published in 1967, would become the cornerstone of a monumental body of work that was basically inspired by Brazilian popular art and would make him one of Brazil’s most important art historians of the 20th century. For example, Arte e Sociedade nos Cemitérios Brasileiros (Art and Society in Brazilian Cemeteries), published in 1972, was considered “the greatest work of the sociology of the arts of the 20th century” by none other than Marshall McLuhan, one of the world’s greatest authorities in the field of communication.

A brilliant pathologist/proctologist and historian of the basic arts, Clarival do Prado Valladares managed to harmonize science and art in an exemplary way. He always suspected that one could lead to the other, and vice versa. He was even more convinced of that when, in 1953 and 1954, he spent some time in the US doing graduate work in Cytology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His daughter, Kátia Valladares, who has a degree in Economics, observes: “It was right then, when analyzing cells through a microscope, that my father began to feel an overwhelming attraction to scientific methods and perceived how that kind of in-depth study could be useful to him in the observation and analysis of works of art.”

A symbolic product of that new outlook combining science and the arts can be seen in a photo published in the “Selected Works” exhibition catalogue. When photographing tile panels in the Cloister in the Convent of St. Anthony in Recife, Clarival do Prado Valladares shot it at an angle very similar to that which scientists view things when peering through a microscope. A glance at this photograph makes it hard to tell whether the art historian/scientist is looking at that artwork through a microscope or a camera lens. In other words, it is hard to know where the art historian ends and the scientist begins. And vice versa.