Interview
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Artistic director of the prestigious New York magazine and friend of the designer who died on Thursday, Françoise Mouly looks back on their long collaboration, the themes that were dear to her and the reception of her work across the Atlantic.
A monument in France, Sempé also enjoyed a cult following in the United States, where he held the record, for a working artist, for the number of covers drawn for the New Yorker – more than a hundred, since his first order in 1978, a few years after an American journalist took away some of his books in her suitcases. Artistic director for three decades of the much revered New York publication, and very touched by the disappearance of this old friend, Françoise Mouly returns to Release on this long-term transatlantic dialogue, thanks to which Sempé said he had found “a drawing family”, failing to speak the language.
How does Sempé’s collaboration with the New Yorker did it unfold?
It started under William Shawn [mythique patron de la rédaction de 1952 à 1987, ndlr], when there was little drawing in the magazine apart from the cartoons, of which he became a mainstay, and the covers – he soon drew a lot. He quit for a while after Shawn, not liking the direction he was taking, but starting in 1992, [la nouvelle rédactrice en chef] Tina Brown brings me in, along with a whole bunch of new…
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