Sempé: grand master of the light-footed drawing

He was the grand master of light-hearted, humorous drawing, the French artist Jean-Jacques Sempé, who passed away on Thursday at the age of 89. His covers for the magazine The New Yorker, for which he has worked since the 1970s, are world famous. Especially panoramic drawings were his specialty, large overviews, often cityscapes in Paris or New York. People are busy on it, walking, running, cycling, in the car. Everything loosely drawn with pen in striking style. And always something funny happens somewhere. He completes the whole with soft watercolor colours.

Like on one of the New Yorkercovers from 1987, where four boats lie like an X in the calm water; at the extreme points in each boat a male is fishing, in the middle, where the boats touch, four women, each in a boat, are chatting with each other.

They are timeless drawings that Sempé makes, not comics or political prints. K. Schippers described Sempé’s drawing style in NRC as follows: “The way of drawing is unadorned, even a bit timid, as if too much emphasis could damage the depicted incident.”

Sempé viewed the human business with compassion: “I do not exclude myself from the humanity I draw,” he once said in an interview in the French magazine Telerama, „I am close to the characters I draw, they resemble me. In mocking them, I mock myself too […] Humor to me means laughing at yourself.” That’s why political cartoons didn’t suit him.

Of his preference for the panoramic view, he said: “The world makes people small, not me.”

As a music lover he also liked to draw orchestras; there is a cover of The New Yorker on which we see an orchestra at the end of a concert. The pianist, the soloist, makes a thank-you gesture to the first violinist, who then makes a similar gesture to the next orchestra member – and so on.

That same melancholic mockery is also in the drawings he made for the stories about the Little Nicholas (Le Petit Nicholas), about the adventures of the French schoolboy Nicholas, written by René Goscinny. Those books are still in print.

wine delivery

Born in Bordeaux in 1932, Sempé started out as a professional draftsman around 1950 when he moved to Paris. He’d tried all sorts of jobs before, wine delivery man-by-bike, bank clerk, but he felt he was good for nothing but a draftsman.

It is his love for music, especially jazz, that inspired him to draw as a schoolboy, he writes in the book C’est la vie! The wonderful world of Sempe (Phaidon, 2014). On the way from school he passed a lingerie store where the cover of the gramophone record was in the window Qu’est-ce qu’on attend pour être heureux? (What are we waiting for to be happy?) sung by Ray Ventura and his jazz band, of which young Sempé was a fan. He cycled especially to keep an eye on the cover, and then tried to draw the tape at home. The book C’est la vie! In addition to a wide selection from his cartoon oeuvre, it also contains drawings by musicians who inspired him, such as Duke Ellington.

Sempé started his career as a joke artist for French magazines. Comics didn’t suit him, and he gradually developed his own cartoon style – or rather genre, with which he also gained international success.

You immediately recognize a Sempé drawing, with the loose, careful lines. Writer and TV comedian Kees van Kooten is a great lover of his work. In his book Passions (2012) Van Kooten describes the Sempé feeling. That’s what you get „when the thought arises that I am such a small, blissfully smiling man, who has just been put on paper with a few virtuoso strokes by the draftsman of Le Petit Nicolas”.