Jean-Jacques Sempe – THE GENIUS OF CARICATURE

French cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempe died at the age of 90. The illustrator was most famous for his collaboration with the writer Rene Gosinni on the series of books “Little Nicolas”, which became a world bestseller.

“It’s not my characters that are small, it’s the world that’s huge, or too big for them”

That’s what Jean-Jacques Sempe, a French cartoonist, once said about the heroes of his amazing drawings. Sempe’s drawings are subtle, literally and figuratively. Readers who rate the caricature on a 2-point scale (funny – not funny) shouldn`t waste time – you will not like it.

Despite the fact that Sempe never studied at art school, he became one of the most famous animators on the planet. Jean-Jacques Sempe was expelled from college. I could not pass the entrance exams to work at the post office, at the bank, and on the railway… So he decided to become an artist and live in Paris. And in 1952 he received an award designed to encourage young artists to become professionals. That’s how his career began.

Like any great artist, Sempe created a world outside of specific cultural and political realities, populated by psychoanalysts, housewives, pianists, dreamy married couples, hooligan children, and other bright types. He is the author of numerous covers of The New Yorker, and Punch magazines.

Jean-Jacques Sempe is a bright and amazing, talented and brilliant, great classic. Sempe’s pictures are childlike spontaneity, poetic imagery, pronounced mood, the fullness of feelings and subtle emotions, a bright feeling of cheerfulness and universal happiness, a suddenly stopped moment of life, a deep breath of clean air, unity and harmony with the surrounding world, romance and kind irony.

Sempe’s graphics are masterful and virtuosic, completely liberated, lively, very light, and dashing technique of execution.