Varlin

Willy Leopold Guggenheim was born on 16 March 1900 in Zurich, Switzerland. Guggenheim attended secondary school and a local school of art and crafts in St. Gallen, where he also completed an apprenticeship of about a year and a half as a lithographer.

In the early 1920s he went to Berlin to study under the printmaker Emil Orlik at a Berlin art school, generally identified as the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts), for about two semesters. He then moved to Paris, where he studied at the Academie Julian. It was in Paris, on the advice of the art dealer Leopold Zborowski, that he adopted the pseudonym Varlin, a reference to Eugene Varlin, a leader of the Paris Commune. Sources place the end of his formal studies around 1926.

Back in Switzerland, Varlin built a figurative practice centered on portraits, nudes, interiors, and public places such as restaurants and hotel lobbies, rendered with an expressionist, often melancholic touch. His reputation grew through the 1950s with exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Luzern (1951, shown with Max Gubler) and the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (1958, with catalogue texts by Manuel Gasser and Max Frisch). He received the Swiss Federal Art Grant three times, in 1937, 1938, and 1939, and a first prize for painting in a Zurich competition in 1947.

The high point of his institutional recognition came in 1960, when he represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale alongside Otto Tschumi and Robert Muller; that same year, Kunsthaus Zurich, his hometown museum, gave him a major exhibition. In 1967 the Kunsthalle Basel mounted a large show and he received the Kunstpreis der Stadt Zurich. Late in his career he found renewed attention in Italy, including a 1968 Rome exhibition presented by the critic Giovanni Testori and a large retrospective of 59 works in Milan, dated variously to 1976 or 1979 across sources. Varlin died on 30 October 1977 in Bondo, in the Val Bregaglia region of canton Graubunden, Switzerland; most reference sources give this date, though one exhibition text gives 20 October 1977. According to Wikipedia, news that the city of Florence had awarded him the Fiorino d'oro for his lifework arrived on the day of his death.

Varlin is consistently described in museum and reference sources as one of the important figurative painters of Swiss postwar art, a status built on early museum shows in Lucerne, St. Gallen, Zurich, and Basel, his 1960 Venice Biennale representation, and later attention from Italian critics including Giovanni Testori. Reference sources characterize his work as expressionist in mood, returning again and again to portraits, nudes, and scenes of public solitude such as empty restaurants and hotel interiors, with a recurring undertone of loneliness and the fragility of ordinary life. No exact, attributable verbatim quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed in the available research and none is reproduced here.

Varlin's auction market is thin and largely regional. The highest price documented in current auction-house records is EUR 101,250, including buyer's premium, for the painting Brasserie Viennoise, sold through Lempertz in Cologne as lot 334 in its auction numbered 1099; the exact calendar date of that sale is not published in the auction house's own artist index. Other documented Lempertz results sit well below that figure, including Ouchy at EUR 22,680 including premium. Some auction-house listings also point to further Swiss results, at Koller Auktionen and Schuler Auktionen, in the low tens of thousands of Swiss francs or below, though these figures have not been independently corroborated for this profile. No catalogue raisonne has been confirmed to exist, and Varlin's estate, the Varlin-Archiv Bondo, functions as the closest thing to an official reference point for the market.

Varlin's market is small, priced mostly in the low tens of thousands of euros or francs, with one documented outlier near six figures; a single strong or weak result can move the picture of "typical" pricing more than it would for an artist with deeper liquidity. There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne, so provenance and, where possible, direct reference to the Varlin-Archiv Bondo matter more than they would for an artist with a published scholarly catalogue. Because sales cluster at Swiss and German auction houses, international buyers should expect a market that is thin, regionally concentrated, and reliant on the artist's own estate for context and verification.