Genius of humorous drawing, the Frenchman Jean-Jacques Sempé, known for his illustrations of the adventures of “Little Nicholas” and his humorous press cartoons, died on Thursday August 11 at the age of 89, his wife Martine Gossieaux Sempé announced to AFP.
“Comedian designer Jean-Jacques Sempé passed away peacefully (Thursday) evening, August 11 (2022), in his 89th year, in his holiday residence, surrounded by his wife and close friends”said Marc Lecarpentier, his biographer and friend, in a statement to AFP.
Read also: Sempé, poetic and nostalgic draftsman
Jean-Jacques Sempé was born in Pessac, near Bordeaux, in 1932. For more than half a century, he traced a work full of bonhomie, swinging, with apparent simplicity, between the serious and the light.
A prolific work
Since “Little Nicholas” which he created in 1959 with his friend René Goscinny (one of the fathers of Asterix), Jean-Jacques Sempé published almost one album a year, signed a hundred front pages of the New Yorker and published dozens of boards in Express and Paris Match, excelling in the art of understatement.
Like Chaval, Bosc and Savignac – his idols – and the Anglos-Saxons who invented cartooning in the 1930s, he creates a world where drawing defies thought: “Everything is complicated” (1963), ” Highs and lows “ (1970), “A slight shift” (1977), “Vaguely competitive” (1985), ” Stay focus “ (2020).
A sought-after artist
Great French master of humor and poetry, a mixture of derision and modesty, Jean-Jacques Sempé has traced from the 1950s until today a work full of good nature.
He was one of the most requested artists by the New Yorker with a hundred covers drawn by his hand.
painful childhood
A natural child, beaten and stuttering, Sempé did not really have the childhood of his hero Nicolas whom he grew up with Goscinny in an idealized France of the 1950s.
He sold his first boards in 1950 to Sud Ouest, which he signed « DRO » (of « to draw »drawing in English).
Since “Little Nicholas” which he created in 1959 with René Goscinny, Jean-Jacques Sempé 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, Saint-Tropez or the Jardin du Luxembourg… In each of his works, we find his themes of predilection: the smallness of man in nature, his loneliness in the city, his arguments, his ridiculousness and his excessive ambitions, the limits of team spirit.
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