THE ART SPY: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland, by Michelle Young
In 1980, while living in Belgium, the historian Lynn H. Nicholas read an obituary in The International Herald Tribune of the art curator Rose Valland, a French Army captain who had received the Legion D’Honneur for recovering more than 60,000 artworks stolen during World War II.
Nicholas was struck by the sheer number of works — and wondered what had happened to the rest. This inspired a decade-long quest to piece together the story, resulting in her landmark 1994 book “The Rape of Europa,” which raised public consciousness about Holocaust theft and helped spark an international restitution movement.
Valland’s unique role, that of a female spy working on behalf of the French Resistance, has long deserved its own special treatment. Michelle Young’s new book, “The Art Spy,” places Valland at the center of the action, and illuminates aspects of her personal life and details about her spying methods that have received scant attention in the past.
Young, an award-winning journalist, has an energetic and novelistic writing style. Her book is broken into bite-size chapters featuring dramatic cliffhangers and vivid sensory details that enhance the historical events. However, the book leans at times toward hagiography, focusing solely on Valland’s commitment to beautiful objects without fully developing her as a human being.
The story primarily takes place at the Jeu de Paume museum, where Valland worked her way up from an unpaid assistant, to head of collections, to the position of the rare, salaried female curator.
After France fell to Germany, the Nazis requisitioned the museum as a sorting facility for art plundered from French Jewish dealers and citizens disenfranchised by the state. The head of the French national collections, Jacques Jaujard, instructed Valland to stay in the building, by any means necessary, and to keep inventories of all the artworks that passed through German hands. She did this with meticulous rigor, managing to fade into the background just enough that the Germans didn’t suspect her — until late in the war.
Despite the claims of the book’s promotional materials, Valland’s story hasn’t been entirely untold. In 1961, she published her French memoir, “Le Front de l’Art,” which sold well and inspired Hollywood’s 1964 Burt Lancaster vehicle, “The Train.”
She’s been portrayed in various fictionalized and historical accounts, including Hector Feliciano’s “The Lost Museum” and Robert Edsel’s “Monuments Men.” George Clooney’s 2014 adaptation of Edsel’s book featured Cate Blanchett as “Claire Simone,” a guarded, tight-lipped and bespectacled museum curator who conceals her espionage activities from Matt Damon’s James Rorimer (until he seduces her).
In many such accounts, Valland is portrayed as a mousy, art-spinster Resistance workhorse. Young offers a more nuanced view, revealing Valland’s private life outside the Jeu de Paume. In fact, Valland had a long-term relationship with Joyce Heer, a German-British woman who served as a secretary at the United States Embassy during the war. Heer, described as a stunning, blond polyglot who could help Valland decipher German documents, seems to have been Valland’s outgoing and charming counterpart.
The shortcomings of previous books are partly a result of Valland’s habitual modesty and secrecy. Her memoir, published in English last year as “The Art Front: The Defense of French Collections 1939-1945,” and translated by Ophélie Jouan, is rigorously objective and unfortunately rather dry fare.
Young has expertly plucked the emotive elements of Valland’s account, and mined her correspondence with Jaujard, her work confidant, for additional tidbits that offer more depth. But, still, the archival cupboard remains rather bare.
In the end, there doesn’t appear to be enough new material or subjective insight available to sustain an entirely new take on Valland; what Young was able to discover still doesn’t quite manage to draw us into her private world.
Young pads the account with a secondary protagonist, Alexandre Rosenberg, the son of the famous French Jewish art dealer Paul, who represented nearly all of the major modernist artists of his era and was a close personal friend to Picasso and Matisse. After vainly attempting to flee the occupied Vichy France, Alexandre became an early recruit to the Free French and helped to liberate Paris. This story, too, has been told in various iterations, and was a key plotline in Patrick Bishop’s recent book, “Paris 1944.”
It has been more than 30 years since Nicholas published “The Rape of Europa,” and it’s fair to assume that a new generation of readers may know little about the Nazi occupation of Paris and the art looting that ensued. Those readers will discover a compelling roundup of what we know so far about this fascinating moment. Anyone familiar with the history, however, will have to be satisfied with just a few new informational nuggets in a well-told recap.
THE ART SPY: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland | By Michelle Young | HarperOne | 390 pp. | $29.99
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