Willy Guggenheim and his twin sister Erna were born in Zurich on March 16, 1900. Their father is a lithographer and owner of a postcard publishing house. After the early death of their father, the family moved to St. Gallen. He began an apprenticeship as a lithographer, which he abandoned to attend the School of Applied Arts. He realized that he wanted to become an artist.
In 1923 he moved to Paris. Over the next few years, like thousands of others, he tried to establish himself as a freelance artist in Paris. He also frequented avant-garde circles - the surrealist Kurt Seligmann was his cousin - but always stuck to his figurative style of painting. Here he also encounters Alberto Giacometti.
In 1930, he met the art dealer Léopold Zborowski: He recommended that he adopt the pseudonym “Varlin”, as he would not be successful with “Guggenheim”, the name of the rich American industrial family. After Zborowski's unexpected death, Varlin returned to Zurich in 1932. For the next thirty years, he lived with his mother and sister in Wollishofen. His relations with France remained close, however, and in 1933 he published a booklet of caricatures there in which he fiercely criticized the Nazi regime.
Success in Switzerland did not materialize for the time being. He made a living for himself, his mother and his sister by occasionally selling paintings and caricatures for the “Nebelspalter”.
His first success came in the 1950s. This enabled Varlin to escape the narrowness of Zurich and he spent long periods in Italy, France, England and Spain.
In 1960, Varlin represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale. In the same year, he received the “Guggenheim International Award”. An exhibition at the newly opened Guggenheim Museum in New York does not materialize, but the Kunsthaus Zürich shows his works.
Varlin's studio near the Schauspielhaus became a meeting place for the literary scene; Max Frisch, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Hugo Loetscher, Jürg Federspiel and the actor Ernst Schröder were among his closest friends, whom he also portrayed.
In 1963, Varlin married Franca Giovanoli. From then on, Bondo, Franca's home village, became his second residence. However, he kept his studio in Zurich. He met Alberto Giacometti occasionally in Bergell, and they had mutual friends: Serafino Corbetta, Giacometti's doctor from Chiavenna, the photographer Ernst Scheidegger and the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Varlin's daughter Patrizia was born in 1966. Through Corbetta, Varlin met the Milanese writer Giovanni Testori. Testori makes Varlin's work known in Italy and puts him in the same league as Giacometti and Bacon. In 1969, Varlin traveled to New York for several weeks.
The new living situation, family, the village, gardening, which he rediscovered for himself, a large studio, but also the discussions with Testori and Dürrenmatt, who often visited him in Bondo, gave Varlin's painting new impulses. His picture formats became even larger, larger than The Salvation Army, which hung in Dürrenmatt's study. The spaces become larger, the perspectives blur, the portraits become more expressive. A highlight is the painting "The People of My Village", his largest painting at almost eight meters long, in which he portrays people from Bondo.
In 1976, Varlin showed his work for the last time in a major retrospective in Milan.
He died in Bondo on October 30, 1977.

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