Lot 188 D

Varlin was born in Zurich as Willy Guggenheim and was the son of a lithographer and publisher. After spending time in Berlin and Paris – where he was in contact with Jules Pascin and Chaim Soutine – Varlin primarily worked in Switzerland from 1932, developing a highly individual style there. Using an extreme impasto technique, he painted a broad range of motifs that gave expression to his predilection for the grotesque, morbid and melancholy.
For the cityscapes he began creating in the 1940s, he primarily selected the shops of the little people, abandoned squares or the austere waiting rooms of the urban rail system. “I tend,” he once wrote, “when I come to a strange city, to ask about prisons, madhouses, horse butchers; this is where the most impoverished, that is, the most painterly quarters are. They are populated by people, not coat racks” (cited in Varlin, exh. cat. Galerie Iris Wazzau, Davos 1984, p. 3).
However, his oeuvre certainly also reveals a taste for the mondaine world of Switzerland’s grand hotels, as demonstrated by the image here. It depicts an imposing hotel building in Ouchy, a district of Lausanne lying directly next to Lake Geneva. The painting is from the collection of the German actor Ernst Schröder, who was friends with Varlin and was also portrayed by him.