For you

As a childhood cartoonist, Jean-Jacques Sempé always has a tender and benevolent eye on this mischievous age where imagination is omnipresent. Straight and proudly armed, the little boy advances towards the sea with confidence and... a miniature harpoon. Will he succeed in terrorizing the seabed? No matter how successful the fishing is, the important thing is to create an adventure and to throw himself into the water.

A real dog's time, ideal for a walk on the bridge of arts, celebrated by Brassens. Jean-Jacques Sempé, full of mischief and poetry, takes advantage of the Parisian mists to play with reality and models, when a Parisian and his dog are unaware that they are being followed by Henry IV on his horse. The Vert-Galant watches, like a benevolent ghost, under the towers of Notre-Dame and its now defunct arrow.

Solitude or multitude? Jean-Jacques Sempé constructs most of his drawings by staging his characters absorbed by the crowd or freely lonely. Here the tightrope walker, symbol of the solitude between heaven and earth, is closely followed by a whole agglutinated mass. A comic gathering, like birds perched high up on electric wires, sign of a sudden need to find a balance between being alone... and (badly) accompanied.

"Jazz is to music what humor drawing is to painting", this quote lent to Duke Elligton and often used by Jean-Jacques Sempé to describe his work, made of complexity disguised as lightness. The music that would have "saved" his life, and especially musicians, jazz legends or amateurs, are themes of predilection for the draftsman. No wonder, then, that a New York jazz club becomes a refuge here to breathe swing into the gloomy winter.

After Paris, New York is the city of predilection for Jean-Jacques Sempé's drawings. Unique for a Frenchman, he drew 101 covers of The New Yorker, fulfilling his teenage dream. Who can capture the poetry and irony of the megalopolis with such subtlety, if not this detail artist with a humorous look? With Sempé New York is a festival of colors and styles, through its communities, its rites and its incessant movement.