Monique Watteau

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

Monique Watteau
Born
Monique Dubois

(1929-12-23) 23 December 1929
Liège, Belgium
NationalityBelgian
Other names
  • Alika Watteau
  • Alika Lindbergh
OccupationWriter, artist
Known forFantasy fiction, cryptozoological art
Spouse(s)

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.[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 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
  • Monique Watteau, La colère végétale (Paris: Plon, 1954)[4]
  • Monique Watteau, La nuit aux yeux de bête (Paris: Plon, 1956)[4]
  • Monique Watteau, L'ange à fourrure (Paris: Plon, 1958)[4]
  • Monique-Alika Watteau, Je suis le ténébreux (Paris: Julliard, 1962)[4]
  • Alika Lindbergh, Nous sommes deux dans l'arche (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1975)[13]
  • Alika Lindbergh, Quand les singes hurleurs se tairont (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1976)[14]
  • Alika Lindbergh, Le testament d'une fée (Paris: E-dite, 2002)[4]
  • Alika Lindbergh, "Préface," in Bernard Marck, Lindbergh, l'ange noir (Paris: L'Archipel, 2006)[15]
  • Alika Lindbergh, "Préface," in Jean-Jacques Barloy, Bernard Heuvelmans, un rebelle de la science (Paris: Oeil du sphinx, 2007)[16]

As illustrator
  • Hubert Dubois, Le danseur du sacre: poèmes, frontispiece by Monique Watteau (Brussels: Éditions des artistes, 1953)[17]
  • André Romus, Voix dans le labyrinthe, frontispiece by Monique Watteau (Paris: Éditions James, P.J. Oswald, 1954)[18]
  • Bernard Heuvelmans, Sur la piste des bêtes ignorées, illustrations by Monique Watteau (Paris: Plon, 1955)[19]
  • Bernard Heuvelmans, Dans le sillage des monstres marins, Vol. I, Le kraken et le poulpe colossal, illustrations by Monique Watteau (Paris: Plon, 1958)[20]
  • Edward Lear, Le hibou et la poussiquette, translated by Francis Steegmuller, illustrated by Monique-Alika Watteau (London: Hart-Davis, 1961)[21]
  • Bernard Heuvelmans, Le grand serpent-de-mer: le problème zoologique et sa solution: histoire des bêtes ignorées de la mer, illustrated by Alika Watteau (Paris: Plon, 1965)[22]
  • Albert Jeannin, En vacances avec l'oncle Antoine, four volumes, illustrated by Alika Watteau (Lausanne: Rencontre, 1967)[23]
  • Bernard Heuvelmans, Les derniers dragons d'Afrique, illustrated by Alika Lindbergh (Paris: Plon, 1978)[24]
  • Bernard Heuvelmans, Les bêtes humaines d'Afrique, illustrated by Alika Lindbergh (Paris: Plon, 1980)[25]
  • Jean-Léo, Histoire illustrée du cirque à Bruxelles: saltimbanques et gens du voyage depuis le dix-septième siècle, illustrations by Alika Lindbergh and others (Brussels: Archives générales du Royaume, 1998)[26]

Other works
  • Ian Cameron, Le cimetière des cachalots, translated from the English by Alika Watteau (Paris: Laffont, 1966)[27]
  • Allain Bougrain-Dubourg, L'agonie des bébés phoques, contributions by Alika Lindbergh and others (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1978)[28]
  • Regards croisés: collectif d'artistes peintres animaliers: Zsuzsa Farkas, Alika Lindbergh, István Nemes, catalogue for a Musée Cantonal de Zoologie exhibition of paintings by Lindbergh and others, 17 March to 19 May 2002 (Lausanne: Musée cantonal de zoologie, 2002)[29]

References
  1. Mosley, Leonard (2000), Lindbergh: A Biography, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, p. 368, ISBN 9780486145624
  2. 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. Verthuy, Maïr (Fall 2003), "Monique Watteau: une éthique prémonitoire", Dalhousie French Studies, 64: 87–92, JSTOR 40836843
  5. Richter, Anne (1995), Le fantastique féminin: d'Ann Radcliffe à Patricia Highsmith, Brussels: Complexe, pp. 21–24, ISBN 9782870275788
  6. 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. 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. 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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