100 - Sempé

Sempé JEAN-JACQUES SEMPÉ Original illustration for the poster of the Sempé exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1978. Signed. India ink, watercolor, and pencil on paper 63 × 94.8 cm (24.8 × 37.32 in.) Goscinny said this about Sempé: “I’ve always been a very keen observer. But spending time with Sempé was as if I’d sharpened my eyes and ears. He taught me this, for example: the conversation you have at a restaurant table—which seems perfectly normal—becomes an inexhaustible source of humor the moment you step back. ” The analysis is spot-on. What remains constant in Sempé’s work is the distance, the long focal length, the small character lost in that vastness, like a child—Little Nicholas—observing the adult world. This is a keen observation, because that’s how the eye works: it first takes in the surroundings and the salient features; the details come later, as in the depiction of this man at the window, whose feathers you only notice a moment later. It’s simple, clear, and always a moment suspended in time. In this illustration, very similar to the first cover Sempé created for the American magazine *The New Yorker* on August 14, 1978, the line is delicate, the color light, expressing itself with poetry and subtlety. No pathos, just a brief moment of reflection—a graphic haiku—that concludes with this observation: what a strange bird!