"Jean-Jacques", as he is affectionately called at the New Yorker, died on August 11 at the age of 89, and the weekly publishes this week on its inside pages its front page of March 28, 1994 representing one of the favorite themes 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 the American cultural and intellectual elites, founded in 1925 and which sat for decades near Times Square, in the heart of Manhattan, has built its reputation thanks to the rigor of its analyzes, reports, reviews, essays, news and cartoons.
He almost always put an illustration on the cover, most often unrelated to the news.
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In tribute to Sempé, who collaborated with the New Yorker from 1978 to 2019, the newspaper will republish one of his drawings, reassembled in the front page, in its edition next week (dated September 5), confides to AFP the French Françoise Mouly, artistic director of the New Yorker since 1993 and who worked for 30 years with the French cartoonist.
"114th One" from 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...), in the ultramodern One World Trade tower. Center in lower Manhattan, rebuilt on the site of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
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.
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In August 1978, the French artist signed his first front page 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 kicked out of school, of the army, he was self-taught and he found it wonderful to be published in a American magazine", recalls Françoise Mouly, 66, publisher, graphic artist and wife of Art Spiegelman, author of the famous comic strip "Maus".
Sempé "at 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 come together" (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.
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Over the years, the popularity of the French cartoonist within the New Yorker was due to the fact that when he "represented an individual, a man, a woman, alone in the city, half of my colleagues told me + but that's is me, it's me!+", smiles Françoise Mouly.
Just "like me, I was thinking this morning on my bike: + I am Sempé's drawing of the old little lady on her bike going to work +", she still has fun.
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 "Little 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.
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In 2009, the publisher Denoël brought together all the New Yorker drawings 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".
© 2022 AFP