Lot 334 D

Varlin, whose given name was Willy Guggenheim, grew up in Zurich as the son of a lithographer and publisher. After his apprenticeship as a lithographer, Guggenheim went to Berlin in 1921 and became a student of Emil Orlik at the state school of applied art. Two years later he was drawn to Paris, where he lived until he returned to Switzerland in 1932. In Paris, Guggenheim went to the Académie Lhote and the Académie Julian, worked as a caricaturist and, in Montmartre, he became acquainted with artists like Jules Pascin and Chaim Soutine. That is also where he met the art dealer and poet Leopold Zborowski, who helped him to secure a studio in La Ruche and recommended he choose a pseudonym: Varlin - a reference to the French revolutionary and anarchist Eugène Varlin.
Although long considered a special case of Swiss art, Varlin's significant contribution to Swiss and European art was acknowledged through important museum exhibitions even during his own lifetime. Shaped by the time he spent in Berlin and Paris, his oeuvre is to be understood as an encomium to life, to the ordinary. Thus, with a conspiratorial melancholy, the people in Varlin's realistic-expressive works appear as the protagonists of a sometimes bitingly, sometimes sadly ironic and bitter Comédie humaine. As an outstanding work of the 1940s, his stage-like depiction of the Brasserie Viennoise seeks to give expression to the shared and absurd drama of human existence, thus recalling not least the works of his writer friends Dürrenmatt and Loetscher.

For this lot, special conditions are applicable (legend "D" according to the conditions of sale).