After René Goscinny, the “Little Nicolas” loses his second dad: the French designer Jean-Jacques Sempé, also known for his humorous press cartoons, especially in the New Yorker magazine, died Thursday at the age of 89.
“The cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempé died peacefully this evening (…) in his holiday residence, surrounded by his wife and close friends“, indicated Marc Lecarpentier, his biographer and friend.
Great French master of humor and poetry, a mixture of derision and modesty, Sempé has traced from the 1950s until today a body of work full of bonhomie: from drawings for the New Yorker and Paris Match to the albums of the “Little Nicholas”. Sempé was one of the most requested artists by the New Yorker with a hundred covers drawn by his hand. Begun in 1978, his collaboration with the famous American magazine continued until 2019.
Sempé had become a draftsman by chance
Born in 1932 in Pessac, near Bordeaux, the designer has published around fifty albums in his career, “Saint Tropez”, “Tout se complicate” and especially “Petit Nicolas”, sold today at some 15 million euros. copies.
A natural child, beaten and stuttering, born in a poor environment, Sempé did not really have the childhood of his hero Nicolas whom he raised with Goscinny in an idealized France of the 1950s.
He had embraced the career of draftsman by chance, dreaming at the start of a career in music. However, as a teenager, he finally fell in love with drawing and he sold his first boards in 1950 to Sud Ouest, which he signed “DRO” (from “to draw”). In 2018, in the columns of Mondehe had made this confidence: “It was easier to find a pencil and paper than a piano…” After which he left school at the age of 14, after the war he managed to make his way in the world of press cartoonists.
Since the “Petit Nicolas” he created in 1959 with René Goscinny (who died in 1977), Jean-Jacques Sempé has published almost one album a year and signed a hundred front pages in the press.
A bus on a bridge crossing the Seine at night, musicians, cyclists, a fire-eater, scenes in Central Park or the Luxembourg Gardens… In each of his works, we find his favorite themes: smallness of man in nature, his loneliness in the city, his arguments, his ridiculousness and his excessive ambitions, the limits of team spirit.
In his latest drawing, published in the August 4 to 10 issue of Paris Match and which sketches a painter in full exercise in a rural setting, Sempé had written: “Think about not forgetting me”. An ultimate work that looks like a premonitory farewell.
“Remember not to forget me.” Sempé’s latest drawing appeared in “Paris Match” last week. pic.twitter.com/VvYQgiDr9P
— Cyril Petit (@CyrilPetit) August 11, 2022