His drawings have accompanied generations of schoolchildren. The French cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempé, known for his illustrations of the adventures of Little Nicholas and his humorous press cartoons, died Thursday, August 11 at the age of 89, announced his wife, Martine Gossieaux Sempé, to AFP.
He is dead “peacefully”, “in his 89th year, at his vacation home, surrounded by his wife and close friends”said Marc Lecarpentier, his biographer and friend, in a statement to AFP.
Born on August 17, 1932 in Pessac (Gironde), the designer has published a dozen albums in his career, Saint Tropez, Everything gets complicated and especially the Little Nicholaswhich has now sold some 15 million copies.
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 good nature. He made drawings for the New Yorker, Paris Match or L’Express to the albums of “Little Nicolas”. Sempé was one of the most requested artists by the New Yorker with a hundred covers drawn by his hand.
Difficult childhood
A natural child, beaten and stuttering, Jean-Jacques Sempé did not really have the childhood of his hero Nicolas whom he raised with René Goscinny, in an idealized France of the 1950s. He sold his first boards in 1950 to the log South West that he signs “DRO” (from “to draw”). Since the “Petit Nicolas” that he created in 1959 with René Goscinny, 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, 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.