The satirical and the surreal genius who has created an unmistakable world of the imagination.
Jean-Jacques Sempe, whose books receive instant classic status in France, is an artist known and loved worldwide, with more than twenty collections of drawings published in over thirty countries. He has created the most immediately recognisable style of any illustrator since James Thurber.
It is his genius for sweeping satirical observation that has won him such a tremendous following in America. Like every great artist, Sempe has created a world above and beyond specific cultural and political references, a world all his own, one populated by long-faced, aquiline-nosed depressives - psychoanalysts, housewives, and concert pianists. Mother rabbits explain divorce, dogs groove to Walkmans, old women nag their Higher Power about money, and any reader who falls into this hilarious and all-too-familiar world finds it hard to leave.
