The latest cover for the magazine, “Biking in the Rain,” is by Jean-Jacques Sempé—or J.J., to his New Yorker readers. It's Sempé’s hundred and eleventh cover for the magazine, a record for contemporary artists. Sempé is eighty-five, and works in his Parisian studio, under the roofs of Montparnasse, where he conceived and rendered this quintessential New York scene. We recently chatted with the artist, en français, about his work for The New Yorker now and over the years.
New York City is one of your most obsessive themes. What draws you to that landscape?
I’m passionately attached to the city, so I try to find it again by drawing it. I love the colors in New York. They’re dynamic: bright yellows, greens, reds, and blues. Paris, where I live, is beautiful but it’s always gray. I love Paris too, but it’s not the same.
What are other differences between drawing New York and Paris? How are the cities different for you?
New York is a place where people know what it’s like to be starting out. New Yorkers have sympathy for those who are trying to se débrouiller, to make do or get by. Novices aren’t discouraged. It’s not a bourgeois town set in its ways like Paris. In New York, everyone has to keep moving forward.
It’s often hard to distinguish what era your work is set in. There’s a timeless quality there. Is that intentional?
You flatter me, but, yes, in a way. When I think about New York, I think about the whole. I try to paint an ambience that has the buildings, the smells, and the sounds, Duke Ellington and James Thurber. Here, I wanted to paint a petite dame, a little old lady who holds her balance in that immense and magnificent town.
Your first published cover was in 1978, yet you’ve made only five or six trips to New York over the past forty years. Why don’t you come more often?
A big issue for me is the language barrier. If I had been able to speak English well, I’d probably have settled there. But I just don’t speak it at all. I didn’t want to be seen as one of those arrogant Frenchmen who only speaks his own language. I hate not being able to talk. It throws me back to the old days, when I was young and so paralyzed with shyness that I stuttered.
You’ve noted Saul Steinberg as an influence. Any others?
Oh, yes! It’s all the artists of The New Yorker who have inspired me. Sam Cobean, Mary Petty, Saxon, or Chas Addams, too numerous to name them all—what they have in common is elegance and lightness of touch. I adore Thurber. I learned from all of them, I shaped my work just so I could fit in that group.
See below for a slide show of some Sempé’s New York City covers.
And for more on Sempé, read about:
• “Waves.”
• “Music to My Ears.”
• “Dance Around a Piano.”
