SEMPÉ IN AMERICA

Tribute to a beloved artist.

French cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempé (1932-2022) was well-known for his instantly identifiable covers for the New Yorker, to which he began contributing in 1978. In his characteristic delicate lines and pastel hues, Sempé captured what he saw as the essence of a country that enchanted him from the first time he visited in 1965. His cartoons, covers, sketches, and doodles (170 illustrations in all), accompanied by essays translated by Dylan Rocknroll, make for a charming volume that reveals the “elegance, tenderness, and lucidity” of a unique artist. Françoisde Closets, Cape Kennedy correspondent for L’Express, recalls his colleague at the Houston Space Center during the Apollo moon launch in 1969. Sempé recorded his impressions of the gigantic rocket, the powerful technology, and the irony: in one cartoon, apartment dwellers all over Manhattan watch the moon on their televisions, while a huge, bright orb shines in the night sky. Janick Jossin recalls how Sempé, at L’Express, caught the “spirit of the times” in his drawings just as journalists did in their writing. Susan Chace describes the decaying, garbage-strewn Central Park that tourists avoided in the 1960s and ’70s. Yet Sempé loved walking through the park, with its joggers, bicyclists, and grumpy old people who lined its benches. His “amused gaze,” portrayed a lovely expanse, welcoming and bucolic, where “fear and decline were absent.” Journalist and lyricist Philippe Labro offers an affectionate recollection of Greenwich Village in the 1960s, a time of “violence and creativity,” music, and hippies, which Sempé captured in “brilliant sketches.” Sempé often took a lofty perspective—perhaps the rooftop of an apartment building where, in one cartoon, he drew a little girl gaily jumping rope. It was a view filled with wonder.

A delightful homage.