Sempé is dead. That’s easy to write, but it’s incomprehensible, because his drawings are the most vivid thing cartoons can ever offer. The feather lightness of his ink strokes seems to rule out all melancholy. But all France is now in mourning; The death of Jean-Jacques Sempé can only be compared to the passing of the two singers Charles Trenet and Johnnie Hallyday in the nation’s collective experience of loss in this century.
darling of the whole country
The draftsman was the darling of the whole country, even if he had hardly left his apartment high above the Boulevard de Montparnasse in Paris in recent decades. And certainly not the city. The last time I saw him – it’s been a long time, years – he was in a wheelchair, but he was being wheeled around an exhibition at the Musée de l’Orangerie, and with his presence he stole from the works on display Degas and Monet and Moreau and Daumier and Doré and Seurat and and and the show. What was the whole art history of his profession compared to this living legend? Against the greatest of all portraitists in Paris and at the same time the France profonde?
Sempé’s Paris
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Image: Diogenes
He was from Bordeaux. There Sempé spent the first eighteen years of his life, but in 1951 he had hardly published the first press drawing that bore his name – in the Bordeaux daily newspaper “Sud Ouest”, which would later become the journalistic home of the series that made him famous: “Le petit Nicolas” (Little Nick) – then his military service took him away and near Paris. As an illegitimate child, he was glad to escape from the place of his youth, which he felt to be joyless, and after only a few years success came in the French capital. In 1957, the then only twenty-five-year-old draftsman managed the coup of being hired as a regular contributor to the popular magazine “Paris Match”, and the social criticism that Sempé smuggled into the glossy magazine there under the veil of his graphic elegance became a warning sign for the Fourth Republic. In the Fifth, founded in 1958, he then managed the feat of becoming something of a state artist, although in 1968 he brought out “Saint Tropez”, a cartoon volume about the French elite, which exposed them as so decadent that that alone caused the uprisings of that years seemed to be justified. But he also scoffed at the left, workers and petty bourgeois. Nobody was safe then.
Image: Drawings from “Little Nick” – Sempé/Goscinny – Diogenes
But that is not the Sempé as we all know it today. Because this magic artist resorted to the art of an ingenious favor in the course of the seventies. His little men and women are the epitome of cuteness, but Sempé himself has continued to thwart the prima facie harmlessness of his staff. Be it through its embedding in an exuberant decor – street canyons, impressive architecture, forces of nature – which condemned it to being tiny and thus also helpless, but which these dwarves unswervingly countered with an individualism that claimed to be able to survive against such superior power Vicinity. Or was it the texts put into the characters’ mouths that turned the tiny creatures into big talkers: no one mastered the blase tone of the bourgeoisie in its hubris like Sempé.