Carijet, Alois

Alois Karidget was the seventh of eleven children of Alois Karijet and Barbara Maria Karijet, nee Lombrizer. Alois was born in the small town of Troon , the canton of Graubünden, and lived up to 9 years on a family farm. In the family of Karijet spoke Romansh - a local dialect of the Romansh language ^[3] . In 1911, due to economic difficulties, the family Caridget moved to the capital of the canton of Chur , where Alois Sr. found a job. Chur was a larger city than Troon, and the move made a depressing impression on 9-year-old Alois, who used to live in the open air of nature, in a rural silence. Subsequently, he mentioned in his memoirs life in Kure as “a gloomy apartment on the first floor in a narrow alley of the city” ^[4] .

In Kura, Alois graduated from a cantonal gymnasium, and in 1918 he enrolled in a training course for the artist Martin Rat, from whom he studied drawing and decorative and applied arts . During his studies, Karidzhet devoted a lot of free time to drawing rural and urban scenes, farm and domestic animals, detailed drawings of birds' heads and beaks, as well as numerous cartoons of their relatives and acquaintances. Many of his drawings were exhibited in the Museum of Regional Studies Chur. Alois completed his studies in 1923, with the highest marks in all subjects ^[5] .

Since 1923, A.Karidzhet began working as an intern in the advertising agency Maxa Dalanga in Zurich . Having won several competitions and earned prestige in the circles of artists-designers, in 1927, Alois opened his own art studio with a staff of six people in Zurich, which regularly received a large volume of orders. Atelier Karijet has produced numerous holiday decorations, commercial and political posters , educational posters for schools, illustrations and cartoons for print media , including for magazines Schweizer Spiegel and SBB-Revue ^[6] . The special success of Karighetu brought the manufacture of a diorama for the Swiss pavilion at the World Exhibition in 1937 in Paris , as well as the design of posters for the Swiss national exhibition Landi, held in Zurich in 1939 ^[7] .

In the early 1930s, Karidget visited Paris, Munich , Vienna and Salzburg , where he met with representatives of the then popular artistic movement New materiality , this was reflected in two of his paintings in 1935, “Red House on Montmartre” ( watercolor ) and “House and a garden in Ascona ”( oil painting on cardboard). Also on the young artist has had an impact and modern expressionism . For example, on the posters for the annual national agricultural fair in Switzerland in 1946 and 1952, Caridget portrayed red horses and green cows, which was recognized by art critics and bewildered by farmers, to which he replied that the cow was green because she ate grass. Along with expressionist works, the 1930s Caridget reflected the everyday motives of the life of the canton Graubünden, and sometimes Zurich, as well as impressions of traveling to France , Spain and Lapland ^[8] .

A.Karidzhet always showed a keen interest in the theater, and since the late 1920s he has been developing stage costumes. Art critic from Zurich Rudolf Jakob Velti attracted Karijet as a set designer and costume designer for the production in the city theater of Zurich Operetbach, after which Karidget developed a design for three more productions in this theater. In 1934 Karidzhet was one of the organizers of the Gherkin cabaret - a satirical program at the Zum Hirschen restaurant in Zurich, which became one of the most famous German-speaking satirical programs during the Nazi regime in Germany and lasted until 1951. Among the artists of this cabaret was the younger brother of Alois - Tsarli . A.Karidzhet developed a cabaret logo - a grinning carrot-nosed gherkin , and from 1935 to 1946 developed grotesque costumes, as well as props design for ten cabaret programs, including the richly decorated barrel organ , which Carli used in his speeches ^{[9] [10]} .

In May 1939, A.Karidzhet spent holidays in the vicinity of his native Troon, and during a walk he discovered on one of the mountain terraces in Obersakssen, the village of Platenga, where, in his own words, "felt the feeling of a long-lost paradise" ^[11] . After that Karidzhet left his business in Zurich and since October 1939 he settled in Plateng in a house without electricity and running water. Alois wished to devote the rest of his life to art - he spent several hours every day in the mountains with binoculars and wrote sketches of future paintings ^[12] .

In 1943, Alois Karidzhet married Berta Carolina Muller (1911-1980), who at the time studied art history in Halle . After the birth of the first daughter in 1944, the Karijet family acquired a plot of land near the chapel in Plateng, and in 1945, Alois developed a project for their new home, which was built in 1946 and was named “Im Sunnefang”. In 1947, a second daughter was born to Alois and Bertha in a new house. To give her daughters a decent education, the Carighet family moved to Zurich in 1950, where Alois took up design again and continued painting. ^[13]

In 1960, A. Karidijet bought a house in Trune, where he spent his childhood, who called Flutginas (Ferns), and lived there until his death. In his speech in Zurich in 1962, Karidget described his paintings as “the art of storytelling” in the age of abstraction, and called the artist Georges Rouault “the greatest of all,” as the instigator of his artistic approach ^[14] .

He died in Troon on August 1, 1985 ^{[15] [16]} .

In 1940, writer Selina Schönz asked Alois to draw illustrations for her book “ The sonorous Ursley ” ( German: Schellen-Ursli , a romansh . Uorsin ). After several years of hesitation, Caridget agreed. In order to feel the atmosphere of Schoenz’s books, he spent several weeks studying the layout and architecture of the village of Guarda in Engadine , the writer's homeland, which became the prototype for the residence of the main character in her book. In October 1945, Schönz’s book with illustrations by Karidget was finally published in German, and in 1950 a translation into English was published. The plot of the book is the story of a boy from a mountain village who set himself the goal to get the largest cow bell in the village from the alpine shepherd’s hut to stand at the head of the traditional procession during the farewell to winter. Schönz's book was translated into ten languages, including Japanese and Afrikaans , the total circulation of its publications in the world was approximately 1.7 million copies ^[17] .

After the tremendous success of the first book about Ursley, Schönz wrote a number of sequels to her, a total of 6 books were published with illustrations by Karidget, including such as Flurina (Flurina und das Wildvögelein. Schellen-Ursli's Schwester) in 1952 ( English Florina and the Wild Bird ) and La naivera (Der grosse Schnee) in 1957 ( The Snowstorm ). In the 1960s, Karidget wrote books Zottel, Zick und Zwerg. Eine Geschichte von drei Geissen (1965), Birnbaum, Birke, Berberitze. Eine Geschichte aus den Bündner Bergen (1967) and Maurus und Madleina. Über den Berg in die Stadt (1969), which he personally illustrated. In 1966, A.Karidzhet was awarded the Swiss Children's Book Prize for the book Zottel, Zick und Zwerg ^[17] .

The International Council on Children's and Juvenile Literature , once every 2 years awarding the H.C. Anderson Prize (often referred to as the “Little Nobel” or “Children's Nobel Prize”) to the authors of the best books for children, decided to introduce an additional nomination for the best artists in 1966. Illustrators of children's books. The first winner of the H.C. Andersen Award in this nomination (1966) was Alois Karijet ^{[1] [2]} .

• Beat stutzer Carigiet. Die frühen Jahre. - Zürich und München: AS Verlag & Buchkonzept AG, 2002. - ISBN 3-905111-73-X .
• Hansjakob Diggelmann. Alois Carigiet: Leben und Werk. - Von Arx & Schnyder, 1992.

• Isobel Leybold-Johnson. Alois Karijet: the great illustrator, the unrecognized master (Neopr.) . The appeal date is September 25, 2015.
• The Alois Carigiet Home Page (eng.) . The appeal date is September 25, 2015.