His disappearance was announced to AFP by his wife Martine Gossieaux Sempé.

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.

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, it 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 emotional. My thoughts go to his family and his loved ones”, reacted Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, on her Twitter account, in unison with several members of the government.

"Sempé is no longer here, but his drawings will remain timeless. They accompanied me to Beirut, to Paris, to New York", tweeted the French Minister of Culture Rima Abdul Malak.

"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."

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As for Joann Sfar, the author of "The Rabbi's Cat", it was in drawing that he paid homage to one of the masters of the genre: "Sempé is dead. It is the first time that I have the certainty 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", "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 (disappeared in 1977), 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 or the Luxembourg Gardens... In each of his works, we find his favorite themes: smallness of man in nature, his loneliness in the city, his arguments, his ridicule and his excessive ambitions, the limits of team spirit.

In his latest drawing, published in the August 4 to 10 issue of Paris Match and which 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.

© 2022 AFP