Jean-Jacques Sempé

Jean-Jacques Sempé (2011)

Jean-Jacques Sempé (born August 17, 1932 in Bordeaux ) is a French draftsman and caricaturist , known as Sempé .

Life

His talent for drawing was already evident in his school days. At the age of eighteen, Sempé volunteered for military service , which he completed near Paris . The reason for this was that he couldn't make a living with his drawings . Since 1957 he has regularly published drawings in French print media such as Paris Match , L'Express , Pilote and in foreign media such as Punch and the New York Times . Several covers of the New Yorker (since 1978) come from his hand. Denoël has published a collection of his drawings almost every year since 1960.

For example, the children's book series Der kleine Nick , which was created in collaboration with the Asterix author René Goscinny , is known. In 1988 he illustrated the children's book Catherine Certitude (German: Catherine, the little dancer ) by the French Nobel Prize laureate Patrick Modiano . In 2008 Sempé was awarded the eoplauen prize .

Sempé is friends with the German writer Patrick Süskind . For his novella The Story of Mr. Sommer from 1991, he wrote the drawings. In return, Süskind translated some of Sempé's works into German.

Style and way of working

Jean-Jacques Sempé (2016)

Goscinny, Modiano and Süskind are the only three authors whose texts Sempé has illustrated. He described the collaboration as a form of symbiosis : his drawings were not based on a finished text; rather, the draftsman and author influenced one another. Usually, however, Sempé works alone and creates his own stories with his pictures. The spectrum of his drawings ranges from individual drawings to small picture stories . Some of the drawings are provided with text or spoken text, whereby the tension arises from the contrast between text and image. Sempé is conservative in his working materials. He uses large-format paper, Indian ink and the same pen “Atome 423”, which has not been produced for years and of which he only has a few remnants.

According to John Lichfield, Sempé is a master of panorama drawing. His high or distant point of view is typical, from which he draws tiny human figures in a landscape or an elaborate cityscape. In contrast to many other caricaturists, who focus their drawings on the central message, Sempé embeds his characters in a detailed environment that reinforces the punch line or distracts from it. Although Sempé also drew other cities such as Saint-Tropez and New York , he is for Andreas Platthaus the typical draftsman of Paris in the same way as Eugène Atget was the photographer of the French metropolis. Sempé never actually depicts reality. Rather, he creates an ideal image of Paris from architectural details, all of which arise from his imagination. According to Charles McGrath, it is a Paris that even Parisians only dream of with attic mansards, high windows and wrought-iron balconies, in which all automobiles still look like they were from the 1950s.

McGrath calls Sempé's heroes “ Gallic every man”: small with a big nose, corpulent, tending to be bald, at the side of well-coiffed women with dotted clothes and double chins. They reflect the struggle between the sexes, the daily need to keep up appearances, the endless cycle of small victories and defeats. For Patrick Süskind, it is often the small details that make Sempé's drawings turn out of the ordinary and thus give them humor, wit and charm. But his drawings did not breathe mere cheerfulness, there was always a deep melancholy in the background , an underlying fear and grief over human loneliness and the fragility of life. Imre Grimm names the “idyll in the monstrous” as Sempé's theme. His fragile heroes are permanently overwhelmed in the world. Sempé once said in an interview: "To be human requires an enormous amount of bravery". The drive of his drawing is "because I do not understand myself and because I do not understand the world". He learns most about people by observing them.

German bibliography (incomplete)

Direct hit, Diogenes , 1959.
How do I tell my children ?, Diogenes, 1960.
Emil, I'm scared !, Diogenes, 1960.
The manipulated society, Bärmeier & Nikel , 1970.
St-Tropez, Diogenes, 1970.
Carlino Caramel, Diogenes, 1971.
All the worse, Diogenes, 1971.
From the ups and downs, Diogenes, 1972.
Sempés Consumer Society, Diogenes, 1973.
Everything is getting more complicated, Diogenes, 1974.
Little Nick and his gang, Diogenes, 1974
How do I seduce women ?, Diogenes, 1974.
How do I seduce men ?, Diogenes, 1974.
Have a good trip !, Diogenes, 1975.
Little Nick and the School, Diogenes, 1975
The bon vivant, Diogenes, 1975.
Bonjour Bonsoir, Diogenes, 1976.
Little Nick and the Girls, Diogenes, 1976
Little Nick and the Vacation, Diogenes, 1976
Small deviation, Diogenes, 1978.
The Social Rise of Monsieur Lambart, Diogenes, 1979.
Sempé's musician, Diogenes, 1980.
Nothing is easy, Diogenes, 1982.
Such a coincidence, Diogenes, 1982.
The Morning Man, Diogenes, 1984.
Sempés cyclist, Diogenes, 1985.
Half won, Diogenes, 1986.
Sempés Consumers, Diogenes, 1986.
Window, Diogenes, 1988.
Silence, sensual pleasure and splendor, Diogenes, 1988.
Sempés relationship boxes, Diogenes, 1988.
Sempé's cats, Diogenes, 1989.
The Bicycle Dealer's Secret, Diogenes, 1996.
Sempés Paris, Diogenes, 2002.
News from little Nick, Diogenes, 2005.
Little Nick is back, Diogenes, 2006.
Little Nick had a surprise, Diogenes, 2008.
Sempé France, Diogenes, 2006.
Yours sincerely, Diogenes, 2008.
Sempé in New York, Diogenes, 2009.
Childhoods, Diogenes, 2012.
Squalls and calm, Diogenes, 2014, ISBN 3257021259 .

Exhibitions

Seven fantastic humorists: Paul Flora , Edward Gorey , Luis Murschetz , JJ Sempé, Roland Topor , Tomi Ungerer , Reiner Zimnik , exhibition catalog: October 5 - November 18, 1972. Daniel Keel Gallery , Zurich 1972, OCLC 758385075 .
Day after day - Sempé in German collections , July 10th to August 8th, 2009, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Munich
A bit of Paris and elsewhere - Jean-Jacques Sempé on his 80th birthday , June 10 to September 23, 2012, Wilhelm Busch - German Museum for Caricature and the Art of Drawing, Hanover