The designer Jean-Jacques Sempé, father with René Goscinny of “Petit Nicolas”, died on Thursday at the age of 89. His humorous – and often poetic – press cartoons have delighted readers of Le Figaro, Le Nouvel Observateur, L’Express, Pilote and even the New Yorker. It was his wife, Martine Gossieaux, who announced his death, his biographer, Marc Lecarpentier, specifying that he had died “peacefully (…) in his holiday residence, surrounded by his wife and his close friends ” .
A solitary child, crippled with tics and stuttering slightly, he grew up in poverty in Pessac, near Bordeaux, raised by a mother who was not stingy with “torgnoles”. “I think that sometimes inspired me. I may draw my strange character from it: I manage to laugh at situations that are not necessarily funny, ”he confided to us about his childhood during a meeting in 2019, on the occasion of a retrospective organized in Rueil-Malmaison (Hauts-de-Seine).
He began to draw around twelve years old, left school at fourteen, found a small job delivering a bicycle and published his first drawings in Sud-Ouest, at barely eighteen years old. Called up by the army, he goes to the capital where he meets the man who will become his friend, the pen who writes when he crunches: René Goscinny. It is he who will see in a drawing by Sempé, soberly titled “Nicolas”, the full potential of this endearing character, whose albums have sold 15 million copies today.
The designer has published around twenty albums in his career: “Saint-Tropez”, “Monsieur Lambert”, ” The musicians “, “Luxury, calm and voluptuousness” or even “Distinguished Feelings”. He was one of the most sought-after artists by the prestigious American magazine The New Yorker, for which he produced around a hundred covers. “Often I was told send them a drawing. But I didn’t dare. And then, one day, crash, they write to me… I was panicked. I went three weeks without sleep,” he recalled.
Passionate about jazz, classical music and cycling, “a simple way to be free”, Jean-Jacques Sempé had two children, Jean-Nicolas, who died two years ago, and Inga, a designer. He had married Martine, his gallery owner and agent, in 2017.
His favorite themes? The smallness of man in nature, his loneliness in the city, his ridiculousness and his excessive ambitions. Those of Sempé were at the height of a man: “I am happy to have continued to draw for so long and to be able to do it a little longer”, he congratulated himself.