The designer Jean-Jacques Sempé is dead

Born on August 17, 1932 in Pessac (Gironde), like Jean Eustache (1938-1981), Jean-Jacques Sempé, the delicate air of a rosière, the best known of discreet designers, died on August 11 at the age 89 years old, announced his wife, Martine Gossieaux Sempé, to Agence France-Presse. He loved Paris with all his heart. The Hôtel de Ville is devoting a retrospective to him, from October 21, 2011 to March 31, 2012? The serious health problem he has just suffered in no way affects his playboy elegance, his class, his seductive courtesy, or his talent. Acapulco’s sky-colored eye, still matching the shirt, quietly slowed speech, that’s all.

Soon, he gets back to work. In June 2014, he produced a series of gold and silver coins for the Monnaie de Paris on the theme of the Values ​​of the Republic. In 2015, he released his latest album, Sincere friendships (co-edition Denoël/Martine Gossieaux), with a freshness equal to the gravity that carries it. Sempé does there, in the company of Marc Lecarpentier (preface and interview), the history and the analysis of friendships worthy of Epicurus, Montaigne and Nietzsche: “Nothing is easy in friendship. You need discretion, modesty, fidelity. » Notice to cabaret traitors. Pascal to the address of the impostors of Zen: “If men knew what they say about each other, there wouldn’t be four friends in the world. »

The philosopher of little Mickeys

Jean-Jacques Sempé was a draftsman. Just a designer? He will have been able to analyze, to make people laugh, to excite, to show what we had never seen, to change the look, to engrave the language of the century, to record its images, to offer to think as much as a Perec (Things), a Bourdieu (The distinction) or a Barthes (Mythologies). The burst of laughter for bonus. A trait, a sense of “reported conversation”, beyond the best satires. The philosopher of little Mickeys.

His beginnings of“very natural child” between biological father and adoptive father – weird! same fate for Siné (1928-2016), the other prince of the line at the XX^e and XXI^e centuries – do not inspire him with mad gaiety: “She was even gloomy and a bit tragic. » It must be said that Mr. Sempé father (adoptive), when he sold his anchovies or jars of pickles on his bicycle, celebrated his marketing genius in all the bistros in the area. And on the way back, atmosphere, mayhem, nervous breakdowns of half-brothers and sisters, flying saucers…

The certainty of having lived with madmen

While the father goes to take over a little white boy, Jean-Jacques sinks into solitude, rowdiness at school and the radio – his survival. Where he discovers Ray Ventura by reading Maurice Leblanc and his mother’s irreplaceable magazines, Confidences, We Two. No resentment against his parents. Very simply, as with the most lucid, the certainty of having lived with madmen. At 12, he draws little Mickeys.

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And takes over almost all the gifts of the father, it is not only among the rich that greatness is transmitted: he therefore delivers, “by bicycle”, as Yves Montand will sing later, powdered toothpaste before becoming a broker in wine, delivery man, valet… “But I was fired. The general’s wife once said to me, “You’re too well brought up to be given orders.” For my part, I had refused to clean his bathtub. Oh no ! Not that. There are limits, however. »

In 1950, he places some drawings in Southwest Sunday whose reputation as artistic directors is second to none. An unnamed chance for me, as a child in Bayonne, to discover Bosc, Chaval, Sempé there, and to read “in real time”, from 1959, the soap opera of the Little Nicholas scripted by René Goscinny. The same year, continues Sempé, “I joined the army [ça alors !]. It was the only way to choose his duty station. I tried everything to stay in Paris. I was ready to do anything: that’s what I did. I often found myself in prison, more out of thoughtlessness than anything else. » Vincennes, Versailles, the garrison, was it good? ” No way. »

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Sport, drawing and jazz

Not being housed in the barracks, “In the evening, I made the wall of the neighboring hospital to enter. I always found a bed to spend the night. It’s a crazy thing, but I had no choice. » He dances well and likes to dance. We won’t know any more. Sport, drawing and especially jazz allow him to hold on: “Duke Ellington, first. Like many people, jazz made me love everything else. The ones I liked spontaneously were the modern ones [soyons un instant informatifs, c’était loin d’être la mode], Charlie Parker, the be-bop…”

In July 1951, he continued his investigations around Paris, was enchanted by everything, the metro, the Parisiennes (very cheerful, already), was featured on the covers of the newspaper of Brussels radio programs The mosquito. Y meets Goscinny after having frequented Chaval and Savignac. Impressed by the advertisements of a wine brand, he finds the name of his character – which is also the first name of his son -, The little Nicolas.

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We invite him to publish everywhere, from France Sunday at Paris Match (another great artistic director, Roger Thérond; later, it will be Michel Archimbaud), via Punch, Esquire and Pilot. Françoise Giroud welcomes him to The Express (1965-1975). He covers the French press from Figaro at Telerama Passing by The new observer, and becomes, his charm helping, one of the personalities of the night; hangs out with Françoise Sagan, Brigitte Bardot, Anémone, Simone Signoret… as a regular at small bouis-bouis that don’t look like much (Le Flore, Lipp, La Closerie, Castel).

Which is not damnable in itself, quite the contrary. The problem is to remain a good draftsman, the draftsman we have always been. In 1978, he made his first cover of the American magazine New Yorker ; of which he will become a star. Faithful to Denoël editions, since 1962 he has published an album a year, with always funny titles (Nothing is simple, Everything gets complicated, Save who can, Hello good evening, Simple question of balance, Raoul Taburin): almost fifty years, until 2015. The little Nicolas invites itself in forty countries.

The in-between that makes you laugh

Sempé draws large, on an immense table: tree leaves, blades of grass one by one, pearls of chandeliers, paneling and moldings, with obsessively charming luxury. Any size reduction flatters the detail, the design: “It’s an activity that comes under the profession, labor. » The drawing can be seen in the blink of an eye, the laughter springs up, and afterwards, we get lost in it for hours, entire nights. He excels in the discrepancy – between text and image, character and nature, individual and city, stupidity and ambition, humility and grandiose -, this feeling of the in-between which makes you laugh, this framing-overflow of situation comedy, on satire background.

He is brilliant in satire, the seized, the gesture, the attitude, the moment, the bicycles, the smile, the cat and the musicians. A jazz lover, he knows how to draw musicians – a very rare talent. It is a special knowledge: the classics with the air of pharmacists who tie their butterfly next to their double bass; the maracas players a little tired of all that; the ladies and their violin on the balcony… Does he remember that time when the newspapers thought they were obliged to specify under the drawings: “Without caption”? “Don’t tell me about it. For us, it was a martyrdom. I’m not sure when this practice fell into disuse. In 1968, it seems to me. » First draft indication.

During a simulacrum of colloquium (pleonasm), winded researchers, galley slaves of quotation and narration, piously took turns to recall – but where are they going to look for all that? – that ” the “ literature had turned away from the real, from the social, from the human, during the 1970s. Well! May Sempé’s death be good for something! That they discover tonight the little Mickeys of The Social Ascension of Monsieur Lambert (Denoel, 1975)! They will be forced to add the 1003^e footnote to their offended pensum. Jacques Réda, writer, poet, had not waited for university at the end of the 1980s, when he directed the New French Reviewto devote an article to Sempé.

In Social Ascension, everything is there: mutations of clichés, changes in spaces (the bistro, the square), violent replacement of furniture, sovereign onomastics (see Balzac, Marcel Aymé, Céline), everything happens “Chez Picard”, where the incredible Lucienne. Exquisite, poignant, philosophical and chiseled narration, and all this under whose gaze, if we understand correctly? Under the gaze of the cat.

Seeded in a few dates

August 17, 1932 Born in Pessac (Gironde)

1950 Starts publishing in “South West Sunday”

1960 Creates “Le Petit Nicolas” with René Goscinny

1978 First cover for the American magazine “New Yorker”

August 11, 2022 Death in France

Francis Marmande