On the Occasion of Jean-Jacques Sempé's Death
04 Aug 2022Jean-Jacques Sempé, the French cartoonist, will be not only a nostalgic figure for the past but also the present. He died just a few days before becoming 90 years old. Thursday started with the news saying that Jean had spent a regular afternoon with his family and friends, and it was over. "A regular afternoon" is a strange phrase, and it is also associated with Sempé's name in the mind of an American individual. A view of a regular afternoon from a window on Fifth avenue is printed on the New Yorker magazine's cover.
Until he was 50 years old, Sempé was an unknown man; when he was a soldier, he started to sell paintings to several magazines in Paris and remained anonymous. Although he got fired from the army and won the "France's Young Talent" award, his name was noted as much as a news column on the inner pages of a local daily. In 1978, he started to work with the New Yorker magazine. Excitedly, he admitted that for the first time, he feels he exists and has found a family. This is a notable reference because, in nearly all commemorations of him, it has been mentioned that the young Jean escaped an unsafe house, left school when he was 14 years old, and although he wished to become a pianist and play jazz, he saw and understood the world through painting.
Even though I think we need to give victims space and detach their stories from the house they have left behind for many years, I deliberately point out that the New Yorker was really Sempé's house. In a note published to honor many years of Sempé's fame, the Guardian newspaper mentioned that when he was 80 years old, the artist still believed that he remembered his experience of home with a damaged image entangled with pain. He admitted that he believed he could leave the pain behind and therefore became a cartoonist. This may sound unrelevant, but let's give the idea a chance. Sempé has explained that he has glazed the pain he experienced during his military service with colors and forms specific to children. The subject of his paintings are regular scenes of a day, frames of ordinary people, a woman employee, a man looking at the city, dancers waiting to get on the stage, or a boy bending on his belly and looking at the pool. They all refer to a human moment, a moment that is sometimes happy, sometimes sad, sometimes empty, but always regular. They always carry a sense of vulnerability. In an interview with the New York Times, Sempé emphasized that he intended to picture such regular moments. Vulnerability is a human condition; he left his traumatic experience as a memory in his paintings. This is a dreadful confession; an unsafe house depicted in colors and lights is the artist's wish and relief, reassuring him that we are all vulnerable and vulnerability is also a human condition. It is a dreadful confession but, at the same time, a mature one. Sempé has been lucky enough to turn pain into meaning.
Years before Sempé worked with the New Yorker, leave us another impressive memory. Gossini asked Sempé to cooperate in producing a book for children, and the little Nicolas was born. It was the figure of a child after the Battle of France. This is why Sempé is a nostalgic figure for both the present and the past.
The little Nicolas propound serious discussions about war and asks questions about borders of nostalgia. Sempé admitted in 2018 that Nicolas was a return to the past for him. He tried to make the burden seem less dreadful without shirking responsibility for the war. He is as successful and popular in creating such an image as he is in depicting regular scenes of the life of a citizen of this world. He has done more than one hundred illustrations for the New Yorker's cover and has created more than forty books for children. Jean-Jacques Sempé is the man of ordinary afternoons on Fifth avenue and passed away in the same context.
Sources:
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www.nytimes.com/2022/08/11/arts/jean-jacques-sempe-dead.html
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www.theguardian.com/books/2022/aug/11/le-petit-nicolas-illustrator-jean-jacques-sempe-dies-aged-89
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www.slate.com/culture/2022/08/jean-jacques-sempe-dies-cartoons-bicycles-petit-nicolas.html
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www.newyorker.com/culture/cover-story/cover-story-2018-05-07
Cover and slider image:
- www.nytimes.com