DISAPPEARANCE – The cartoonist died Thursday, in his vacation home, said Marc Lecarpentier, his biographer and friend.
Here, Sempé is no more. He will no longer shoot his Indian arrow-shaped features that often touched our hearts. France mourns the death of the father of Little Nicholas.
His lines were verses, his drawings were writing poems. Like the painter of the Roaring Twenties, Foujita who said he wanted “arrive with a single point to represent an entire universe», the dream of Jean-Jacques Sempé which will have consisted in embracing the world as it is, by mixing its small characters so endearing with the immensity of the landscapes which they cross, broke there.
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Even if he has just died at the venerable age of 89, Sempé can be reassured: he has succeeded in the mission he had set himself. During one of his last public outings on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Little Nicholas at the end of March 2019 at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, Jean-Jacques Sempé had taken a walk with a slew of children. He was still valiant – and smiling – despite not leaving his wheelchair. “You see…