Tribute to Sempé, the New Yorker

Jean-Jacques Sempé, a beaten and out-of-school child, has become a New York icon in forty years by signing more than 110 covers of the prestigious cultural magazine The New Yorker, which this month pays tribute to this discreet genius of cartooning, just gone. Jean-Jacques, as he is affectionately called at the New Yorker, died on August 11 at the age of 89, and the weekly published this week on the inside pages of his front page of March 28, 1994 representing one of the themes of favorite of the French artist who loved New York so much: a tiny man carrying a briefcase and walking on a red carpet at the entrance of a building, surrounded by colorful and gigantic skyscrapers. The magazine of American cultural and intellectual elites, founded in 1925 and which for decades had its headquarters near Times Square, in the heart of Manhattan, has built its reputation on the rigor of its analyses, reports, reviews, essays, news and cartoons. He almost always put an illustration on the cover, most often unrelated to the news. In tribute to Sempé, who collaborated with the New Yorker from 1978 to 2019, the newspaper will republish one of his drawings, reassembled in one, in its edition of next week dated September 5, confides to AFP the French Françoise Mouly, artistic director of the New Yorker since 1993 and who worked for thirty years with the French cartoonist.

In tribute to Sempé, who collaborated with the “New Yorker” from 1978 to 2019, the newspaper will republish one of his cartoons, reprinted in its edition of next week dated September 5. Timothy A. Clary/AFP

114th cover of the “New Yorker”

“It will be the 114th cover of the magazine illustrated by Jean-Jacques, she says delicately, from the functional offices of the Condé Nast press group (Vogue, Vanity Fair, etc.), in the ultramodern One World Trade Center tower, in lower Manhattan, rebuilt on the site of the attacks of September 11, 2001. New York and its prestigious New Yorker were a youthful dream for Sempé. He realized it in the 1970s thanks to his meeting with the American cartoonist Ed Koren who introduced him to the boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, and introduced him to the journalists and managers of the magazine. In August 1978, the French artist signed his first cover by drawing an office worker hesitating to take flight from the edge of a building window. Over 113 covers, he traces his joy of living in this megalopolis which he travels on foot and by bike in all weathers, without speaking English, amazed by its colors, its energy, its cats, its tiny humans in the face of gigantism urban, its community mosaic, its music and its green spaces. “Jean-Jacques was a very modest, very humble man (…) he had been expelled from school, from the army, he was self-taught and he found it wonderful to be published in an American magazine,” recalls Françoise Mouly, 66, publisher, graphic artist and wife of Art Spiegelman, author of the famous comic book Maus.

In tribute to Sempé, who collaborated with the “New Yorker” from 1978 to 2019, the newspaper will republish one of his cartoons, reprinted in its edition of next week dated September 5. Tomothy A. Clary/AFP

Sempé at his home in New York

For Françoise Mouly, Sempé “has always felt at home in New York”, a city of nearly nine million souls which “is not America (but) more or less an island off the coast of the America, where people meet” and “where no community dominates” the other. Arrived in New York, Sempé “was able to detect his human aspect” and “these are the human stories that are remembered by his covers”, she retains. Over the years, the popularity of the French cartoonist within the New Yorker has been due to the fact that when he “represented an individual, a man, a woman, alone in the city, half of my colleagues said to me ‘but it’s it’s me, it’s me!” », smiles Françoise Mouly. Just like me, I was thinking this morning on my bike: ‘I’m Sempé’s drawing of the little old lady on her bike going to work’”, she laughs again.

And Sempé is even displayed on the walls of the city

At the corner of 9th Avenue and 47th Street in Manhattan, a giant fresco signed by the author of Petit Nicolas, half-erased on the back of a building, represents characters typical of the draftsman’s line: a man carrying a woman on his bicycle, followed by a boy on a bicycle. The publisher Denoël had collected in 2009 all the drawings of the New Yorker in the album Sempé in New York and another book, Sempé in America, is planned for September, according to Françoise Mouly who thinks that “the New York of Sempé will remain” .

Nicolas REVISE/AFP