Monique Watteau

Last updated
Monique Watteau
Born
Monique Dubois

(1929-12-23) 23 December 1929 (age 93)
Liège, Belgium
NationalityBelgian
Other names
  • Alika Watteau
  • Alika Lindbergh
Occupation(s)Writer, artist
Known for Fantasy fiction, cryptozoological art
Spouses

Alika Lindbergh (born Monique Dubois, 23 December 1929), commonly known by her former name Monique Watteau, is a Belgian fantasy fiction writer and artist.

Contents

Early life

Watteau was born Monique Dubois [1] in Liège on 23 December 1929. Her father was Hubert Dubois, a playwright and poet with ties to Surrealism. [2]

Watteau studied painting and drawing at the Académie royale des beaux-arts de Liège, and then went on to the Royal Conservatory of Liège to study theatre. At twenty, she left Belgium for Paris, where she met the Belgian scientist Bernard Heuvelmans, famous for his work in cryptozoology. [2] In 1951, she appeared under the name Monique Watteau in Jean Anouilh's film Two Pennies' Worth of Violets  [ fr ]. [3] She also worked as a photography model. [2]

Career

Watteau's first novel, La colère végétale, was published in 1954. Critics praised it as a striking literary debut; [4] [5] Albert-Marie Schmidt wrote that Watteau had created "a new kind of fantasy" (un nouveau fantastique). [5] Watteau was reportedly considered for the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Femina, but she was removed from the running of the latter prize in 1954 when the jury discovered that she had posed for nude photographs. [2]

Her following novels, La nuit aux yeux de bête (1956), L'ange à fourrure (1958), and Je suis le ténébreux (1962), cemented her reputation as one of the foremost Francophone fantasy writers of the twentieth century. [4] Her work is marked by its sensuality of expression and its ecological, Taoist, and Surrealist themes. [4] The writer Anne Richter  [ fr ] described Watteau's novels as prime examples of feminism in twentieth-century fantasy. [5]

Her first three novels were written under the name Monique Watteau; her fourth gave her name as Monique-Alika Watteau. After its publication, she abandoned the name Monique altogether, [4] going by Alika Watteau [6] and later Alika Lindbergh. [4]

After publishing four novels, she turned to painting as a career. [4] Her output as a painter includes a notable corpus of cryptozoological art, [7] including her work as the primary illustrator of Bernard Heuvelmans's books. [4] When the cartoonist Hergé, researching Tintin in Tibet , asked Heuvelmans for details on the yeti, Watteau supplied a "graphic reconstitution" of the creature for Hergé's reference. [8]

In the 1970s, Watteau published two new books, Nous sommes deux dans l'Arche et Quand les singes hurleurs se tairont. [2] She published an autobiographical work, Le testament d'une fée, in 2002. [4]

Watteau also worked as an animal rights activist. [6] In the early 1990s, she was the president of the Cercle national pour la défense de la vie, de la nature, et de l'animal (CNDVNA), a conservation advocacy group within the French National Front. [9]

Personal life

Heuvelmans was Watteau's first husband; [4] they divorced in 1961, [2] but remained friends and collaborators. [4] According to her autobiography, Watteau was romantically involved with actor Yul Brynner from 1961 to 1967. [2] It was after this affair that she changed her first name to Alika, which she and Brynner had used as her nom d'amour . [10]

She married zoologist Scott Lindbergh, [2] son of aviator Charles Lindbergh, in 1968. [1] In 1972, Lindbergh and Watteau established a grant-funded primate research center on an 82-acre estate in the Dordogne valley in France, where they raised and studied dozens of South American monkeys. [11] Watteau and Lindbergh separated in 1983. [2]

During Watteau's marriage to Lindbergh, the couple arranged for Heuvelmans, then in poverty, to live in a small house on the grounds of the Dordogne estate. [10] Watteau attended to Heuvelmans during his final years, [12] and was with him at his death in 2001. [2] In accordance with his last wishes, Watteau was in charge of his private funeral in Le Vésinet. [12]

List of works

The following list comprises the original publications of Watteau's works. Because Watteau used multiple names, each entry includes the name under which the work was published.

As writer

As illustrator

Other works

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<i>The Shepherds</i> (Watteau) Painting by Antoine Watteau

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<i>The Worried Lover</i> Painting by Antoine Watteau

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<i>Cupid Disarmed</i> (Watteau) Painting by Antoine Watteau

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<i>The Chord</i> (painting) Painting by Antoine Watteau

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<i>Mezzetino</i> (Watteau) Painting by Antoine Watteau

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<i>Perfect Harmony</i> (painting) Painting by Antoine Watteau

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<i>Holy Family</i> (Watteau) Painting by Antoine Watteau

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References

  1. 1 2 Mosley, Leonard (2000), Lindbergh: A Biography, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, p. 368, ISBN   9780486145624
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Matthys, Francis (15 August 2002), "Alika Lindbergh, construite pour l'amour fou", La Libre Belgique , retrieved 14 March 2015
  3. ↑ "Deux sous de violettes", Gaumont.fr, Gaumont Film Company, 2013, retrieved 14 March 2015
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Verthuy, Maïr (Fall 2003), "Monique Watteau: une éthique prémonitoire", Dalhousie French Studies, 64: 87–92, JSTOR   40836843
  5. 1 2 3 Richter, Anne (1995), Le fantastique féminin: d'Ann Radcliffe à Patricia Highsmith, Brussels: Complexe, pp. 21–24, ISBN   9782870275788
  6. 1 2 Lindbergh, Anne Morrow (2012), Against Wind and Tide: Letters and Journals, 1947–1986, ed. Reeve Lindbergh, New York: Pantheon Books, p. 240, ISBN   9780307378880
  7. ↑ Coleman, Loren; Clark, Jerome (1999), Cryptozoology A to Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature, New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 208, ISBN   9780684856025
  8. ↑ Peeters, Benoît (2012), Hergé, Son of Tintin, trans. Tina A. Kover, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 272, ISBN   9781421404547
  9. ↑ Davies, Peter (1999), The National Front in France: Ideology, Discourse and Power, London: Routledge, p. 110, ISBN   9781134725304
  10. 1 2 Sykes, Bryan (2016), Bigfoot, Yeti, and the Last Neanderthal: A Geneticist's Search for Modern Apemen, Newburyport, MA: Disinformation Books, p. 70
  11. ↑ "Son Says Lindbergh Lived for Future", The Hartford Courant, p. 23, 4 May 1977
  12. 1 2 Coleman, Loren (2001), "Bernard Heuvelmans (1916–2001)", The Anomalist, retrieved 14 March 2015
  13. ↑ "Nous sommes deux dans l'arche", WorldCat , OCLC   417468937
  14. ↑ "Quand les singes hurleurs se tairont", WorldCat , OCLC   417657398
  15. ↑ "Lindbergh, l'ange noir", WorldCat , OCLC   254970335
  16. ↑ "Bernard Heuvelmans, un rebelle de la science", WorldCat , OCLC   173273754
  17. ↑ "Le danseur du sacre", WorldCat , OCLC   37592440
  18. ↑ "Voix dans le labyrinthe", WorldCat , OCLC   77968715
  19. ↑ "Sur la piste des bêtes ignorées", WorldCat , OCLC   459306408
  20. ↑ "Dans le sillage des monstres marins", WorldCat , OCLC   491862476
  21. ↑ "Le hibou et la poussiquette", WorldCat , OCLC   1860989
  22. ↑ "Le grand serpent-de-mer", WorldCat , OCLC   716189471
  23. ↑ "En vacances avec l'oncle Antoine", WorldCat , OCLC   80426632
  24. ↑ "Les derniers dragons d'Afrique", WorldCat , OCLC   461670058
  25. ↑ "Les bêtes humaines d'Afrique", WorldCat , OCLC   8132920
  26. ↑ "Histoire illustrée du cirque à Bruxelles", WorldCat , OCLC   762866910
  27. ↑ "Le cimetière des cachalots", WorldCat , OCLC   850985663
  28. ↑ "L'agonie des bébés phoques", WorldCat , OCLC   4514031
  29. ↑ "Regards croisés", WorldCat , OCLC   84689134
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