Varlin (Willy Guggenheim)

Varlin (Willy Guggenheim) Ouchy 1942 Oil on cardboard. 54.5 x 65 cm. Framed. Signed lower right gray 'VARLIN', upper left titled red and white 'OUCHY'. - Partly with slight craquelé. Tedeschi-Pellanda/Guggenheim 337 Provenance Acquired by the previous owner directly from the artist; since then in family possession Berlin Literature Ernst Schröder, Varlin. The 7th decade, in: du, 30. jg., March 1970, p. 174, 204 Born in Zurich, Varlin, whose real name was Willy Guggenheim, was the son of a lithographer and publisher. After stays in Berlin and Paris - there with contacts to Jules Pascin and Chaim Soutine - Varlin was active since 1932 mainly in Switzerland, where he developed a highly individual style. With his exceedingly impasto painting style, he created a broad spectrum of subjects in which he expressed his preference for the grotesque, the morbid and the melancholic. In the cityscapes he created from the 1940s onward, he chose predominantly the stores of the little people, empty squares, or the unadorned waiting rooms of city trains. "I am in the habit," he once wrote, "when I come to a foreign city, of inquiring about penitentiaries, insane asylums, horse-butcheries; there are the poorest, therefore most paintable quarters. People, not clothes racks, socialize there." (quoted from Varlin, Ausst. Kat. Galerie Iris Wazzau, Davos 1984, p. 3). His oeuvre, however, definitely reveals a soft spot for the sophisticated world of Swiss grand hotels, as the present motif attests. It shows an imposing hotel building in Ouchy, a district of Lausanne located directly on Lake Geneva. The painting comes from the collection of the German actor Ernst Schröder, who was a friend of Varlin and was also portrayed by him.