Monique Watteau

Monique Watteau
Born Monique Dubois
(1929-12-23) December 23, 1929
Liège, Belgium
Nationality Belgian
Other names
  • Alika Watteau
  • Alika Lindbergh
Occupation Writer, artist
Known for Fantasy fiction, cryptozoological art
Spouse(s)

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

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]

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.[10] Watteau and Lindbergh separated in 1983.[2]

Watteau attended to Heuvelmans during his final years,[11] 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 Vesinet.[11]

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

References

  1. 1 2 Mosley, Leonard (2000), Lindbergh: A Biography, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, p. 368
  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, pp. 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
  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
  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
  8. ↑ Peeters, Benoît (2012), Hergé, Son of Tintin, trans. Tina A. Kover, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 272
  9. ↑ Davies, Peter (1999), The National Front in France: Ideology, Discourse and Power, London: Routledge, p. 110
  10. ↑ "Son Says Lindbergh Lived for Future", The Hartford Courant, p. 23, 4 May 1977
  11. 1 2 Coleman, Loren (2001), "Bernard Heuvelmans (1916–2001)", The Anomalist, retrieved 14 March 2015
  12. ↑ "Nous sommes deux dans l'arche", Worldcat, retrieved 14 March 2015
  13. ↑ "Quand les singes hurleurs se tairont", Worldcat, retrieved 14 March 2015
  14. ↑ "Lindbergh, l'ange noir", Worldcat, retrieved 15 March 2015
  15. ↑ "Bernard Heuvelmans, un rebelle de la science", Worldcat, retrieved 15 March 2015
  16. ↑ "Le danseur du sacre", Worldcat, retrieved 15 March 2015
  17. ↑ "Voix dans le labyrinthe", Worldcat, retrieved 15 March 2015
  18. ↑ "Sur la piste des bêtes ignorées", Worldcat, retrieved 15 March 2015
  19. ↑ "Dans le sillage des monstres marins", Worldcat, retrieved 15 March 2015
  20. ↑ "Le hibou et la poussiquette", Worldcat, retrieved 15 March 2015
  21. ↑ "Le grand serpent-de-mer", Worldcat, retrieved 15 March 2015
  22. ↑ "En vacances avec l'oncle Antoine", Worldcat, retrieved 15 March 2015
  23. ↑ "Les derniers dragons d'Afrique", Worldcat, retrieved 15 March 2015
  24. ↑ "Les bêtes humaines d'Afrique", Worldcat, retrieved 15 March 2015
  25. ↑ "Histoire illustrée du cirque à Bruxelles", Worldcat, retrieved 15 March 2015
  26. ↑ "Le cimetière des cachalots", Worldcat, retrieved 15 March 2015
  27. ↑ "L'agonie des bébés phoques", Worldcat, retrieved 15 March 2015
  28. ↑ "Regards croisés", Worldcat, retrieved 15 March 2015
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/16/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.