(Paris) After René Goscinny, the “Little Nicolas” loses his second dad: the French cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempé, also known for his humorous press cartoons, notably in the prestigious magazine New Yorkerdied Thursday at the age of 89.
Posted at 4:18 p.m.
Updated at 6:34 p.m.
His disappearance was announced to AFP by his wife Martine Gossieaux Sempé.
“Comedian designer Jean-Jacques Sempé passed away peacefully this evening […] in his holiday residence, surrounded by his wife and close friends,” also indicated Marc Lecarpentier, his biographer and friend, in a statement to AFP.
Great French master of humor and poetry, a mixture of derision and modesty, Sempé has traced from the 1950s until today a work full of bonhomie: drawings for the New Yorker, Paris Match or L’Express to the albums of Little Nicolas.
Sempé was one of the artists most sought after by the New Yorker with a hundred hand-drawn covers. Begun in 1978, his collaboration with the famous American magazine continued until 2019.
The announcement of his disappearance provoked many tributes and reactions, in the political, economic, media and artistic spheres, both in France and abroad.
“Sempé was the drawing, it was the text. It was the smile and the poetry. It was sometimes the tear in the eye of laughter, this evening, it is of emotion. My thoughts are with his family and loved ones, ”reacted Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, on her Twitter account, in unison with several members of the government.
“Sempé is no longer there, but his drawings will remain timeless. They accompanied me to Beirut, to Paris, to New York,” French Culture Minister Rima Abdul Malak tweeted. “With tenderness, poetry and mischief, a humor that unfolds to infinity and absolute freedom, he taught us to look at the world with the eyes of a child. »
As for Joann Sfar, the author of the “Cat of the Rabbi”, it is in drawing that he paid homage to one of the masters of the genre: “Sempé is dead. This is the first time I have been certain that a God is in heaven,” he wrote.
One album per year
Born in 1932 in Pessac, near Bordeaux, the designer has published around fifty albums in his career, Saint Tropez, Everything gets complicated and especially the Little Nicholaswhich has now sold some 15 million copies.
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 “Dr O” (from “to draw”).
Since Little Nicholas which he created in 1959 with René Goscinny (disappeared in 1977), 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 or the Luxembourg Gardens… In each of his works, we find his favorite themes: the smallness of nature. 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, which appeared in the August 4-10 issue of Paris Match and who 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.