Rose Valland

What most intrigued and shocked me in reading this well-written and deeply researched new biography and history called The Art Spy (New York: HarperCollins, 2025, 390 pages, including notes) by the American art historian Michelle Young about Rose Valland (1898-1980), the acting curator of Jeu de Palme Museum in Paris from the 1930s to 1950s, and an art spy on behalf of the French Resistance against the Nazis, was the massive crime of greed the Nazis perpetrated against the world of fine art in Paris, how that greed began like a trickle of water at the beginning of the occupation and then became a torrential wave that helped transform the “City of Light” into a ‘city of darkness.’ This book details the heroic commitment of Rose Valland as she recorded in stunning detail what happened to the art stolen by the Nazis between 1939 and 1944.  

Rose cataloged every work of art by classical and modern painters and sculptors that were taken from Jewish homes and galleries, art collectors and French museums by Nazi criminals for themselves, for Hitler’s “Führermuseum,” or for the purpose of selling them at inflated prices to support the German war effort. The Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris was the art center the Nazis used to accumulate tens of thousands of stolen paintings, drawings, sculptures, jewelry, furniture, books, and other fine art to ship out of the French capital.

Hitler’s second-in-command, Hermann Göring (1893-1946), who Michelle Young characterized as “an insatiable predator,” visited Jeu de Palme from Berlin dozens of times and walked away cumulatively with thousands of master-works for himself that he promised he would pay for, but never sent a franc. Göring was convicted by the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal after the war for his many crimes against the Jews and others and sentenced to hang, but he committed suicide a day before the execution could take place.

Another Nazi art thief, standing six feet and four inches, was the “handsome and athletic Bruna Lohse” (1911-2007). He absconded with hundreds of master paintings and pieces of fine art, was tried after the war in a French military trial – Rose served as one of the prosecution witnesses – but Lohse charmed his American interrogators and ultimately was acquitted. He went on to become wealthy as a German art dealer well into his 80s, never expressing any remorse for his war crimes.

Michelle Young cites the names of many Nazis and collaborating French art historians whose names and deeds have subsided into the rear-view mirror of history. She brings them forward so we now know who they were and what crimes they committed.

Young reports:

“The Nazis looted approximately 650,000 works of art [thousands from 69,619 Jewish homes] by war’s end in Europe during WWII. Rose and her team were responsible for the restitution of more than sixty-one thousand works of art in the decade after World War II. Even when the world moved on, Rose was still fighting. Today, it is believed that over one hundred thousand pieces of Nazi-confiscated artwork, taken from all over Europe, have yet to be recovered.”

This means that thousands of today’s contemporary private art collectors and art museums around the world are holding, unwittingly perhaps, many famous art objects stolen from French Jews, from other collectors and from European museums. They include the master works of Da Vinci, Veronese, Rembrandt, Delacroix, David, Picasso, Degas, Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Duchamp, Chagall, Matisse, Braque, Leger, Ensor, Klee, Rodin, Pissarro, and many others.

Over a period of four years, Michelle Young (fluent in French, German and English) painstakingly, and with the assistance of her husband, read every letter, list, and document written and saved by Rose Valland, who safe-guarded all her records meticulously in her apartment.  

Rose was unpaid for years at Jeu de Palme because of the misogynist and petty hostility of Henri Verne who oversaw the national museums in France and the Ecole du Louvre. For Rose, she continued to do her work because for her, preserving the world’s great art was a labor of love.

Rose lived with her life-partner, Joyce Heer, in Paris’ Latin Quarter. Joyce was a “half-German British citizen employed by the US embassy…who lived in a world of constant uncertainty because the British, even before the war began, were treated like the enemy, even by non-Germans.”

Joyce was imprisoned for about six months and suffered hunger and humiliation before being released. The two women “lived in perpetual terror that they might be overheard speaking English or spied on.” Undeterred, Rose understood that her role was to chronicle what was happening to the fine art the Nazis stole for shipment by train and truck to Germany.

Paul Rosenberg (1881-1959), one of the most wealthy prewar Paris Jewish gallery owners, collectors and agents for modern masters including Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, escaped Paris with his entire family to New York City before the Nazis conquered Paris. Only his son Alexandre (1921-1987) refused to go to America and instead fought in the French Resistance under the leadership of the exiled General Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970). Michelle Young tells the Rosenberg family story fully in this book. The Nazis stole virtually everything the Rosenbergs owned except what they had sent abroad or hid in the French country-side before the war began.

One might think, while reading this well-documented biography, that the theft of such massive amounts of art is secondary to the murder of six million Jews and the havoc and brutality the Nazis wreaked upon Europe, and they would be right. The point of the book, nevertheless, is to highlight the heroism of Rose Valland who risked her life daily to save French high culture. That is a story worth telling that Michelle Young told so very well.

Young wrote eloquently of the essence of art itself and the Nazi destruction of master works they called “degenerate art”:

“Each painting held thousands of years of collective evolution in the art of representation, to humanize, …thousands of years of contemplation on how the real three-dimensional world and the complexity of human nature could be embodied on a two-dimensional canvas. Art is transcendent–a visual medium that stirs emotion and helps people understand their place in a world that can never be fully comprehended. Even the earliest men and women made rudimentary art within the environment around them. This wanton destruction in the Nazi rooms in the Louvre served to erase a form of expression through which humans differentiated themselves from animals. And yet, here were men of a supposedly superior race acting in the most inhuman, destructive way.”

Young wrote about Rose’s deepest intention:

“It would have been painful for Rose to see her museum used as a laundering facility [Rose called the Jeu de Paume a “confiscation factory”] for stolen art by deceitful men with dubious intentions. Her job, her life calling, was about celebrating the beauty in art and presenting it to the public, but now she was witnessing the wholesale theft of the world’s finest creations.” [Rose’s hope was that the Allies] “would one day prevail and her intelligence could be used. With her inside glimpse into Nazi operations, she could see how, as she later stated, ‘the persecution against the Jews was coupled with the looting of their property.’”

Michelle Young tells the stories of other French heroes during war as well, specifically Jacque Jaujard (1895-1967), Valland’s ally, who sought to stand in the way whenever possible of the Nazi plunder of Europe’s art treasures as the director of the Louvre Museum. Jaujard also had deep concern for his Jewish workers in the museum. Presciently, Jaujard evacuated major works starting in 1938 when many in France thought the war was about to start. Villard quoted Jaujard: “I would like my Jewish colleagues to leave first.” Young wrote: “…knowing what fate might befall them in the hands of the Germans. There was no detail that Jaujard would overlook.”

As they did everywhere, the Nazis created euphemisms to describe the worst of their crimes (e.g. “The Final Solution” for the Shoah – “transfer” and “safeguarding” for the plunder of Europe’s art). Rose described the Nazi thievery as a “camouflage of intentions.” The Nazis, under the mastermind of Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946), a Baltic German Nazi theorist and ideologue who was tried and convicted at the Nuremberg Trials and executed for his war crimes in 1946, was the one who classified many artworks as “degenerate art,” that is, art that did not fit with the racial-creed of the Aryan vision of culture.

Rose was stoic throughout the war and “did not allow herself the luxury of crying or feeling sorry for herself.” Rather, she developed her spy craft, “discreetly eyeing the shipping labels to decipher their destinations…surveilling Nazi staffers, even discovering their home addresses down to the floors and apartments they lived in.”

Young concludes the book by describing the allied invasion of France on the Normandy beaches on D-Day (June 6, 1944), and the eventual re-taking of Paris by the allied powers and the French Resistance, as well as some of the violent retribution by Parisians upon French collaborators with the Nazis. She also describes Rose’s eight-year-long effort to retrieve what she estimated to be 100,000 works of art that had been looted from France alone, and return it, to the best of her ability, to their rightful owners based upon her detailed journals and record-keeping.

Rose died in Paris in 1980 in obscurity at the age of eighty-one, three years after her life-partner Joyce Heer died. They are buried together in a cemetery in Rose’s hometown, Saint-Etienne-de-Saint-Geoirs, France.

Michelle Young’s thorough historical and biographical treatment of this heroine of the French Resistance fills a gaping hole in our knowledge of one of the greatest crimes in history and one of the most courageous women of the Nazi era. I recommend this book highly. It ought to be part of every library covering the history of art, WWII and the Holocaust.