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French cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempe, who received worldwide acclaim with a collection of greater than 100 drawings for the covers of The New Yorker journal, has died on the age of 89.
His cartoons usually confirmed small figures set in giant city landscapes, drawn in delicate traces and providing mild social commentary on fashionable life.
“Tender irony, the delicatesse of intelligence, the jazz: we will be unable to neglect Sempe. We are going to sorely miss his view of the world and his pencil,” French President Emmanuel Macron wrote on Twitter.
Considered one of France’s most well-known visible artists, Sempe drew scenes of every day life in elaborate element, often from an overhead or faraway perspective and in pastel colors.
Born Aug. 17, 1932 in a village close to Bordeaux, Sempe didn’t full highschool, drifted from job to job and briefly joined the military earlier than transferring to Paris within the Nineteen Fifties and beginning to earn a dwelling along with his drawings.
He had his first success within the late Nineteen Fifties with the “Le Petit Nicolas” collection of youngsters’s books a few schoolboy, with Asterix author Rene Goscinny.
His worldwide breakthrough got here within the late Nineteen Seventies, when he began drawing covers for The New Yorker, sketching metropolis life as seen by an outsider wanting in, his characters usually misplaced in large crowds or set towards huge panoramas.
Most of his drawings had little or no dialogue, however brief captions usually subtly trace on the characters’ worries or hopes.
“There may be numerous silent emotion within the drawings of Sempe,” Le Monde cartoonist Plantu stated on France Inter radio. Sempe’s favorite topics had been youngsters, bushes, cats, musicians and life in Paris and New York. His cartoons not often used textual content to make wry touch upon big-city life.
>> To learn extra: https://www.newyorker.com/tradition/cover-story/cover-story-2019-09-23
A November 2015 New Yorker cowl exhibits a wealthy-looking older couple going for an autumn stroll on a New York sidewalk as two uniformed doormen shovel useless leaves in entrance of them to create the phantasm of a stroll within the forest.
Individuals using bicycles had been one in all Sempe’s favorite topics.
“It’s at all times been one in all my desires — to have a bunch of pals who go for bike rides within the nation each Sunday morning. In actual life, it by no means occurred. I saved making an attempt to prepare it however everybody was at all times too busy to decelerate for it,” he advised The New Yorker in a 2019 interview.
(REUTERS)
In addition to his work on “Le Petit Nicolas”, an idealised imaginative and prescient of childhood in Nineteen Fifties France which grew to become a global best-seller, Sempe additionally illustrated extra New Yorker journal covers than every other artist.
“The cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempe died peacefully (Thursday) night, August 11 (2022), in his 89th 12 months, at his vacation residence, surrounded by his spouse and his shut pals,” stated Marc Lecarpentier, his biographer and buddy, in a press release to AFP.
Sempe, who initially needed to be a jazz pianist and had a troublesome childhood, dropped out of faculty aged 14 earlier than mendacity about his age to hitch the military.
Military life did not agree with him, nevertheless, and he started promoting drawings to Parisian newspapers and whereas working at a press company befriended cartooning legend Rene Goscinny of “Asterix” fame.
Collectively in 1959 they invented “Little Nicolas”.
“The Nicolas tales had been a approach to revisit the distress I endured whereas rising up whereas ensuring every part got here out simply high quality,” Sempe stated in 2018.
At the moment the books are worldwide best-sellers with greater than 15 million copies offered in 45 international locations, and have been tailored into a preferred movie and cartoon collection.
However in 1959 they went largely unnoticed, and he continued to promote drawings to newspapers to make ends meet, an early profession he described as “horrible”.
It was solely in 1978 when he was employed by The New Yoker that he discovered sustainable success. “I used to be nearly 50 and for the primary time in my life, I existed! I had lastly discovered my household,” he stated.
(AFP)
