Sempé

 

Every day there are obituaries for forgotten film actors and minor rock stars and we try to remember what we remember of them and pass on to climate updates. Today I read of the death of Sempé in the newspaper, which gives me pause, as images of good humour and cheerfulness and an indescribable nostalgia fill my mind that perhaps I should try to describe before the effervescent moment passes, before the opportunity is lost in daily routine. Sempé, it says, produced (past tense) more covers for The New Yorker than any other artist, a claim that I thought would have belonged to Saul Steinberg, that master of the ink nib still life and the infinite detail. When my in-laws, who subscribe, hand on the next supermarket bag of this magazine my eye always catches the latest Sempé cartoon, its florid watercolours and dreamy graphics like something out of Marc Chagall just this side of when Chagall goes incautiously sentimental. I eventually tear off the cover, after reading articles about forgotten American authors and minor travellers to antique moons, and place it with the others inside the flap of one of my books of Sempé art. These are books that I purchased in big remainder shops, in the days when Melbourne had such shops, a dozen copies of full-colour Sempé books stacked up on tables amidst all the other dozens of stacks of dozens of individual art titles. During forgotten rainy weekends and minor hours on summer mornings, I pass the time browsing through art books like Sempé’s, admiring how with a pen he can create an entire treescape, possibly a Parisian park, using little unconnected bendy lines like Edward Ardizzone, with visitors caught in a humourous moment that only I the reader am privy to. Impressionism is one of Jean-Jacques Sempé’s debts and Paris is his environment, the Paris of Ludwig Bemelmans, another artist-storyteller of whimsical realism, sitting at a garret window, outlining roofscapes and rooftop gardeners with crosshatched watering cans. The obituaries say he wanted to be a jazz musician, which explains why jazz and musicians are such favourite subjects in his drawings, Sempé playing out the dream via his own discovered best medium. Phrases in the obituaries possess all the glancing accuracy of Sempé: ‘irony and tenderness’ says Orhan Pamuk, ‘a lot of silent emotion’ says fellow artist Plantu. We read about how he overcame a violent childhood to illustrate the world and its inhabitants with exuberance and wit, a joy in the present moment that animates his portraits of Gerard Hoffnung musicians at their instruments or Ronald Searle gabblers at cafés, of a dreamer on a bicycle bicycling benignly through sketchy Michael Leunig-like seasons along a forgotten street in a minor arrondissement.