Jean Jacques Sempe
Jean-Jacques Sempé, the French cartoonist known in America for children’s book illustrations and for covers for The New Yorker portraying tiny, gentle people with big noses at poignant moments, often dwarfed by monumental backgrounds, died on Thursday. He was 89.
In a nighttime panorama of sleeping city skyscrapers, Sempé illuminated a ballerina in a window. On the soaring span of the Brooklyn Bridge, a lone Sempé bicycle rider churned bravely. And before a large blackboard choked with Einstein calculations, his scruffy little genius soft-boiled an egg.
It was timeless storytelling without words, a kind of pictorial haiku, the droll whimsies of an illustrator who never attended art school but who, for a half-century at the drawing board, had bypassed life’s meanspirited realities for a mythical world of mischievous schoolboys, daydreamers, nosy neighbors, holidaymakers, and swooning lovers.
Ruddy and white-haired, he lived and worked in Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, but he often traveled to New York to confer with editors and publishers and to collect ideas for his spidery pen-and-ink drawings, which made generous use of vivid watercolors or white space. His long and wide perspectives took in sweeps of sea and sky, great forests, or monumental rooms that dwarfed the small dramas that were his focus.
His subjects were office workers, housewives, delicate little girls, frustrated commuters, pretentious intellectuals, musicians, roller skaters, and bike riders, whom he adored because he was one of them. His men were likely to be portly and balding, with tidy mustaches and sometimes wearing berets; the women were often double-chinned matrons in polka-dot frocks.
Each New Yorker cover was like a scene from a larger story, and Sempé’s enormous backdrops exaggerated the effect. On Oct. 24, 2005, it was a tiny dancer in a tutu, waiting to be called while sitting on a bench under the statue of a great ballerina in a gigantic performing space. On Nov. 14, 2011, it was a small boy with a violin case, looking in at a studio of towering basses, huge drums, and a menacing maestro pounding a grand piano.
To illustrate the pride of the French housewife dedicated to cleanliness, Sempé drew madame polishing the tracks of a railroad line that ran just outside her front gate.
For sheer joy, he drew a girl skipping rope on a tenement roof with the great city rising behind her like an audience of the future.
And for sheer glad-to-be-alive happiness, there was Sempé’s man in the dunes, alone at the beachfront at the end of a perfect September day, tipping his hat at the incoming Atlantic.
“Vulnerability is la condition humaine, and my vulnerability is reflected in that of the people I draw,” Sempé told The Times in 1980. “You must see inside the people you draw to be a good artist — or a good humorist.”
