"Comedian designer Jean-Jacques Sempé passed away peacefully (Thursday) evening, August 11 (2022), in his 89th year, in his vacation home, surrounded by his wife and close friends," said 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 good nature: 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.
Born in 1932 in Pessac, near Bordeaux, the designer has published around fifty albums in his career, "Saint Tropez", "Tout se complicate" and especially "Petit Nicolas", sold today at some 15 million euros. 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 "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.
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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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© 2022 AFP