Imaginary interview with Sempé
by Charactorium · Sempé · Visual Arts · Culture · Literature · 6 min read
A Parisian studio where sheets covered in tiny silhouettes lie around, a bottle of India ink, and the murmur of a jazz record. Jean-Jacques Sempé, pencil set down but his eye still anxious, agrees to look back on sixty years spent drawing very small people in worlds too big for them.
—How does a child from Bordeaux, expelled from school, come to decide he will be a cartoonist?
In Bordeaux, childhood was not easy, and I'll quickly move past it. I was kicked out of school for indiscipline, which is a polite way of saying I couldn't sit still and daydreamed instead of listening. I went from one odd job to another, then I lied about my age to join the army, which shows you how eager I was to be elsewhere. And all the while, I doodled. I eventually sold my first drawings to the local press, to Sud Ouest, for a few coins. It wasn't much, but seeing your line printed on newsprint at eighteen is a decision that makes itself.
Seeing your line printed on newsprint at eighteen is a decision that makes itself.
—What remains of those years of hustling in your way of working?
What remains is fear, honestly. When you start with nothing, no school, no name, you keep the feeling your whole life that you're going to get kicked out a second time. I came to Paris with that worry in my luggage, and it never left me. It made me obsessive: I redo a drawing ten times, twenty times, I throw it away, I start over. People think it's perfectionism, but it's mostly the fear of not being good enough. A self-taught person has no diploma to wave when things go wrong; he only has his pen and his doubt. So you work until the line, finally, stops trembling for the wrong reasons.
A self-taught person has no diploma to wave when things go wrong; he only has his pen and his doubt.
—Do you remember the birth of Little Nicolas, with René Goscinny?
René Goscinny and I were two boys who liked to laugh at the same silly things. In 1959, we invented that schoolboy, Little Nicolas, first for Sud Ouest Dimanche, then for Pilote. He wrote that child's voice so perfectly — recess, buddies, stories of new kids at school with impossible names — and I drew the rabble around them. What still touches me is that we didn't think we were creating a monument. We were making two adults laugh who remembered being happy dunces. That this schoolboy ended up translated all over the world, and even brought to the movies much later, baffles me a little. We had simply drawn a schoolyard.
We were making two adults laugh who remembered being happy dunces.
—What did Goscinny bring you, the artist, that you wouldn't have found alone?
He brought me the words, and above all a sense of rhythm. Goscinny had that comic clockwork; he knew exactly when a line should land. My job was silence: a setting, a tiny character, and the emptiness around. Together, on Little Nicolas, we formed a funny mechanism, the caption and the image answering each other. You know, I've always used the caption under a drawing sparingly, because I believe an image that talks too much no longer breathes. With him, it was different: his text didn't block my drawing; it opened a window. We trusted each other, which, between two worriers like us, is almost a miracle.
An image that talks too much no longer breathes.
—Why are your characters so small, lost in immense settings?
Because that's how I see us. I've always wanted to draw very small people in huge settings, a city, a landscape, a concert hall where the orchestra fits in a thimble. It's not cruelty, it's tenderness: I think a tiny man under a sky too big says very well what we all are. Technically, I need those vast empty spaces, those stretches of white paper that my pen and India ink let breathe. The emptiness is not nothing; it's what makes the small character moving. Remove the immensity, and there's just a little man; keep it, and he becomes each of us.
A tiny man under a sky too big says very well what we all are.
—How does your line, so fine and trembling, serve this worldview?
My line is nervous, light, a bit shaky, and I think it resembles me: it never quite dares. With India ink, every line is final, you can't go back over it, so I practice for a long time so that clumsiness becomes, if possible, grace. When color comes, I switch to watercolor, those diluted hues that cast a soft light without ever weighing down. It's a matter of accepted fragility. A line too sure of itself would be a lie; life is not sure of itself. I like the reader to feel, in the line, the hand that hesitates, because that hesitation, deep down, is our own in the face of existence.
A line too sure of itself would be a lie; life is not sure of itself.
—How does a French cartoonist end up signing covers for The New Yorker?
Through admiration, first. I long looked at The New Yorker from afar, that American magazine of crazy elegance, telling myself I'd never have a place there. And then, from 1978 onward, I was asked to draw a cover, then another, and I ended up signing over a hundred, up to recent years. It was intimidating: imagine being invited to play at the home of those you revere. New York, that immense city, was the perfect setting for me — all that height, those endless avenues, and in it a solitary, tiny silhouette crossing. I didn't need to change my subject; I just had to drop my little man there.
Imagine being invited to play at the home of those you revere.
—What did New York offer your pencil that Paris did not?
Excess. Paris is my size, with its roofs, its passersby, its bistros where you solve the world's problems; it's my city, the one I stroll through in the afternoon to watch people live. But New York exaggerates everything, and that's a gift for someone like me who plays with the contrast between the immense and the tiny. There, immensity is already drawn: you just place a character at the bottom of a tower and melancholy arises on its own. For the covers, I often worked in watercolor, to soften that concrete hardness, to slip a bit of reverie into it. Perhaps that's my role as a foreigner: to make a city that thinks itself invincible tender.
To make a city that thinks itself invincible tender.
—You are described as tormented, constantly redoing. What does a workday look like?
It starts early and badly, if I may say so. In the morning, I am haunted by my assignments, those press deadlines that don't forgive; I doodle, I search for the idea, between two coffees and long stretches of doubt. In the afternoon, I sit at my table and redo, tirelessly, the same scene, until it finally has the lightness I'm after. It's exhausting, this dissatisfaction. I think I draw first to make myself laugh: if the drawing doesn't get a smile out of me, it's worth nothing, and I throw it away. An artist never happy with his line, that's what I've remained, with little hope of being cured.
If the drawing doesn't get a smile out of me, it's worth nothing.
—What place does music, and jazz in particular, hold in your inspiration?
An immense place, almost bigger than drawing. In the evening, I listen to jazz, classical music too, which I revere, and I could say that's where I truly breathe. The piano and orchestras appear constantly in my panels: tiny musicians in vast halls, a lone pianist under an oversized chandelier. It's the same subject as always, the small man and the immense world, but transposed into sound. Music teaches me tempo, the silence between two notes — exactly what I seek in the white of my drawings. Without it, I think my line would be drier; jazz gives it that way of floating, a little.
Music teaches me the silence between two notes — exactly what I seek in the white of my drawings.
—After so many years, what would you say to someone discovering your drawings for the first time?
I would tell them not to look for a grand message, because there isn't one. There's only a gaze, a little tender, a little sad, placed on ordinary people — a cyclist on his bicycle in a countryside too vast, a couple arguing, a walker lost in the city. If, in one of those albums, Nothing Is Simple or Everything Gets Complicated, a single image gives them the feeling of being less alone, then I'll have done my job. I never wanted to teach anything. I only tried, with my trembling pen, to say that we are all tiny, all a little lost, and that it is precisely for that reason that we must look at each other with gentleness.
We are all tiny, all a little lost, and that is precisely why we must look at each other with gentleness.
This imaginary interview was generated by artificial intelligence from sources documented in Sempé's profile. It dramatises what the figure might have said based on what we know about them, but does not constitute attested historical testimony. For primary sources and factual documentation, refer to the full profile.