Varlin on Varlin
1900
March 16th: the light of the world sees me for the first time. Born a Pisces, with a twin sister, I live in Schutzengasse (Sagittarius Street): such a conjunction of zodiacal signs creates the ideal conditions for the birth of a genius. As a baby, I must have resembled the paintings I have made of my own daughter: diabolical bawling and associated smells. Later, my first steps, the search in boxes without bottoms, disappearing into dark wardrobes, and, consequently, the discovery of a “third dimension” which, until now, several modern artists with “static” encephalograms still ignore. My father died when I was twelve years old; two months earlier, my elder sister died. I moved with my family to St. Gallen. About St. Gallen, there is absolutely nothing to say: “in St. Gallen, the weather is always fine”. Precisely: cantonal school, professional school, and a year and a half as an apprentice to the lithographic firm of Seitz. I have my first experience in working Senefelder stones, whose parchment-like colour is as lifeless as a corpse. Those stones are as cold as corpses even to one's touch.
However, Manet, Daumier, Gavarini, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Steinlen managed to give life to these corpses. I, coming after them, had to draw boring things, bring them to the printer and correct the mistakes on the “proofs” with a brush. I remember correcting, day after day, the wrongly printed reflection in President Woodrow Wilson's pince-nez (readers will recall we were at the end of the First World War). I swore never in my life to do another lithograph, and, until now, with extremely few exceptions, I have kept my word.
1918
I settle in Berlin. I attend the school of Arts and Crafts, and Orlik is my teacher. In a Berlin dialect: "Can you draw an ear from memory? No, no one can. Georg Grosz drew thousands of ears with me. You can go to Cassirers, where they exhibited the first Zes Annes (Cezanne). For me, these Zes Annes are much too odd. But, what, you want to go already? Where? And where, Paris? But I do not know anything about you yet, or if you have learned or not".
1923
In Paris, where I stay for eleven years. My lodgings, with or without lice, are in rue Tournefort, rue Vaugirard, rue Bourgeois, rue St. Jacques, rue Vercingectorix. I attend the Academie Julian.
1926
My mother loses the family estate. I was compelled to realise that art does not feed one and that it is necessary, in one way or another, for an artist to earn a living. I become an employee of Messrs. Risacher, Faubourg Montmartre. Barely employed, I am thrown out: “Vous n'etes pas meme capable de tallier un crayon”. I make some drawings for comical magazines: Frou-Frou, and Ric-Rac. The obscene content of it is more important than aesthetics. I exhibit at the Salon des Humoristes.
1929
I have a studio in rue de Vanves. A picture on the easel illustrates this interlude; a sofa on the bare cement floor, a “His Master's Voice” gramophone, and in the background a disgusting toothbrush dumped in a glass. In Van Gogh's painting of his own room in Arles, the covers are immaculately clean, and a towel near the wall is properly folded.... of course, I have not yet cut off my ear.
1930
On my return home, I found a note on the chamberpot: "On l’a couvert. Cela sentait trop mauvais". Signed Leopold Zborowski. Precisely he, who had discovered Modigliani and Soutine and who has now set his eyes on me. Contract with Zborowski. He shows me a photograph resembling himself, but it is not he, but a French revolutionary who, together with Courbet, overthrew the Vendome column. Zborowski believes that I will be unsuccessful with an honest and wealthy-sounding bourgeois name, such as that of Guggenheim, the same name as that of the American magnate, collector of art and owner of Parisian stables, and, above all, considering that my paintings represented the world of the dejected. From that moment, I become Varlin, the name of Courbet's revolutionary friend. Already during my lifetime, I had the honour of having a street dedicated to my name. Zborowski rents a studio for me in La Ruche, where Archipenko, Soutine, Chagall, and Leger all have lived. I stay for a while at Cros-de-Cagnes in the South of France. My first exhibition at the Galerie Sloden, Faubourg St. Honore. Such was its success that it was extended.
1932
Zborowski dies.
1933
Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich begins.
1935
I returned with my mother and my sister to the safe bosom of Mother Helvetia. We go to live in a three-room apartment in Seestrasse at Wollishofen, thinking we shall be leaving it soon: we stay for thirty-five years. I use the apartment as a studio. It is typically in “Ensor Style”: the false renaissance sideboard, the black piano with Jugendstil candlesticks. On the sideboard there are sculpted stags from Brienz, and colourfully stained Japanese vases. The flea-ridden Persian rug was once taken out to be beaten in the courtyard; it nearly caused a solar eclipse. From the administrator's letter: “If you continue to beat rugs of that type, we will evict you”.
1936
I rent a studio in Venedigli (Little Venice); it's a house about to be demolished, without railings and with cardboard instead of glass in the windows. Camping out with me are the painters Leo Leuppi, the Dane Olsen, Gusti Vogt, the sculptor Louis Conne, and two sculptors, Hans Hippele and Meinrad Marti, who died before their time. Our “Di Gana Du” parties (which stands for Die Ganze Nacht durch or for the whole evening) make us famous throughout the town, and they are advertised on all the walls of the city. Once a potential picture client vanished forever on finding two calf's eyes on my front doorstep which were intended for the administrator's dog.
1937
I lodge a protest with Righini, the “Pope” of art, because he had not granted me a federal scholarship despite my having sent him a beautiful nude seen from behind. Righini: "I have never seen a nude back from the front". The next year and for the following two years, I receive the government grant.
The Venedigli area is demolished.
I rent as my studio a primitive room which is as dark as the stomach of a cow. When you own absolutely nothing, you discover the art of being satisfied by the smallest and simplest joys: letting a small piece of soap slip from your hands in the bath and then trying to recapture it, peeling the skin of a sausage or giving a lump of sugar to the first horse that passes....
1939
Together with Winker, a painter from Basel, I travel to the Alsace. He advises me to show some paintings to Georg Schmidt, the curator of Basel's Kunstmuseum. After a detailed examination, Schmidt asks: "How long have you been painting?"
The Second World War breaks out.
1940
Within the atmosphere of “mutual affection” current in those years, there were only Hodler and Amiet: paintings of alpine landscapes and paintings of geraniums. All this provokes in me a state of rebellion and of nausea.
1941
I am called up for my military service at Uster. During the repeated inspections, I kick the furniture. During the blackout, I throw the house encyclopaedia out of the window. I can't manage to do anything. I go for walks in Langestrasse. Afternoons, I spent at the cinema. Since I am no longer painting, I compensate with three packets of Gauloises daily. My guiding star finally causes me to meet congenial companions, a Parisian in the Foreign Legion and a Vaudoise who is superior to me; he, in fact, knows the prison, which I have only painted from the outside, from the inside. Once, while the grocer was preparing powdered white pigment for me in the back of his shop, my two friends discovered their predilection for Chanel and Coty parfumes. With extraordinary ability, they pocketed some bottles. I am still scared today by this event. My mother consults a psychiatrist.
1942
Max Eichenberg becomes the critic for Tat.
1944
Manuel Gasser writes the first article about me in Weltwoche. Its title is: "Is he a bluff or something more?" I win a competition organised by the municipality of Zurich on the theme “The City of Zurich”. I had painted as my subject the Cantonal Hospital. The critics: "Mr. President, would you hang such a painting in your own sitting-room?" The Ziircher Nachrichten stated: "He paints barracks as if they were bent by the wind. A sad painter of grey tones". I have an exhibition at the Moss Gallery, on the Limmatquai. In the Zürcher Nachtrichten: "Now he is colourful. It is a pity he no longer has greys".
I move, with my mother and sister, to Goldenberg Castle, a dark villa near Feldbach. The subject of a painting of the time: my mother watching over a family of mice in the kitchen. My mother: "I do not like the land-agent's face". The land-agent: "In the room where you paint, the banker Reichlin shot himself. The ballerina Lucretia hanged herself in the living-room. And the Prince Starenberg: who knows of his whereabouts? It is said he drowned in the lake".
To save my life there are Eichenberg's poems. One evening I am present when Eichenberg himself reads his poems at the headquarters of some Zurich association. I miss the last train back to Feldbach. That same evening the whole ceiling falls onto my bed.
1945
The Second World War ends.
1946
Now I do not even have a studio. What should I do? Nothing. I could not do anything. I return to my mother's flat to paint. If Cezanne wrote that he felt he was the greatest painter in France and Gauguin that he was the greatest in the world, then I was not even the greatest painter in the Wollishofen quarter, since the artist Gert Niggli, who specialised in gentians, was living there.
1948
The municipal administration offers me a studio. It is a rococo pavillion at Beckenhofgut. For eight years, my personal physical needs are restricted: the loo, which was at the end of the park, was closed. I used a small fountain in front of my studio to wash myself and to rinse my brushes. Franca Giovanoli appears for the first time in my studio. She had enquired about me. Hearing that I was innocuous and specialised in pictures of umbrellas, she had dared to make herself known.
1951
Exhibition at the Kunstmuseum in Lucerne, with Max Gubler.
1952
My beloved mother dies.
1953
I discover I am attracted to cooks and waitresses, just like Baudelaire, who preferred them to countesses. The first one is Brigitte, a peasant who had escaped from the region of Bern; she just settled herself in the rococo pavillion. I realise immediately that Baudelaire was wrong. At my first pass, she says: "Piss off, you asshole!" I manage to set up a kitchennette, in the pavillion, that is. Brigitte disappears in the autumn mists. The Italian, Livia, next comes to live in the pavillion. On carnival night she leaves a nylon overcoat near the stove. The whole pavillion burns as if it were made of straw. Have you ever seen a white stucco rococo pavillion become as black as a coal mine? Forty pictures reduced to ashes, the rest are completely black. I am not insured. The next morning at the bar: "Livia, what a mess you have landed me in!" She replies: "You always like to joke, you..."
1954
Arnold Rudlinger opens my exhibition at the Kunsthalle in Bern.
1956
I stay in Venice. In six months I have climbed more than four hundred bridges with steps and have seen so much water that I had to surrender to alcohol. I return to Zurich with an unemployed sailor from the navy. Now I have a butler; but he doesn't last for long. He is paying court to the daughter of a regional counsellor, and the Immigration Police deports him.
I travel to Britain, Spain, and Morocco.
1958
Exhibition at the Kunstmuseum in St. Gallen. Georg Schmidt opens it. The introductions in the catalogue are by Manuel Gasser and Max Frisch.
1960
I take part in the Venice Biennale. I win the Guggenheim prize. Now sixty years old, I can exhibit at the Kunsthaus in Zurich. A big crowd. "It is a matter of casting a glance at a cynical portraitist and painter of anecdotes..." Only a certain Mr. Blass from Zurich buys a painting, more, three pictures. Praised be that courageous man! Manual Gasser dedicates an entire number of the magazine DU to me. Also the city of Zurich becomes generous: they give me a studio. The “chiaroscuro” studio is located at Neumarkt; it is shaded by salad-green trees. I portray myself as one of the May bugs that live in them. One day, I see Ella, the dressmaker, from my window. For two years, I follow in the footsteps of Degas: I paint dressmakers and milliners.
1963
I marry Franca.
1964
Harry Szeemann organises an exhibition of my pictures at the Municipal Gallery of Biel/Bienne. The introduction to the catalogue is by Hugo Loetscher.
1966
In time, I discover the masochism of those intellectuals who come to me to have their portraits painted. Their joy of self-injury also brings me new clients: Frisch is followed by Dürrenmatt; Anna Indermaur's portrait finds a pendant in “Mother Zumsteg”, the owner of the Kronenhalle. The “Association for the Injured by Varlin” counts names always more illustrious. I shall only mention “the Apostle of Peace”, Daetwyler, the Mayor of Zurich, every kind of lawyer, Dr. Willy Staehlin, the paediatrician Fanconi, and Professor Corbetta from Chiavenna, the writer Hugo Loetscher, the actor Ernst Schröder, the great French photographer Cartier-Bresson. And so on, and so on: always more distinguished men. It does seem things are going better.
1967
A cottage in the country. A nurse and a baby. A washing machine. The “City of Zurich” prize. A dishwasher. A wife giving herself airs with a new ocelot fur coat. A Fiat. Fingernails always clean and trousers well-ironed.