The Spy in the Jeu de Paume

The word “resistance” is in heavy rotation these days, but it’s difficult to pin down its meaning in the current political landscape. For Americans of the last generation, however, it generally referred to the heroic French Resistance, which fought fascism during World War II by means of espionage and sabotage. This Resistance was not a single unified movement. It was more often the work of small cells and in some cases individuals, doing what they could to blunt the effects of authoritarianism for as long as they could.

The Art Front: The Defense of French Collections, 1939–1945, a new English translation of a postwar memoir by the French Resistance hero Rose Valland, gives us an opportunity to consider the power that an individual can have in the face of great evil. Valland, a curator and collections manager at the Jeu de Paume in Paris when the German occupiers requisitioned the museum in late 1940, practiced a quiet form of resistance. She managed to avoid being dismissed from her job, and she was thus able to observe the Nazis’ art-looting operation, surreptitiously taking notes and holding on to her secrets until the time was right. Her weapons were eavesdropping, cataloging skills, and attention to detail, and her information later aided in the recovery of tens of thousands of artworks.

In the forty-five years since her death in 1980, Valland’s story has been featured in at least a dozen nonfiction books, many of them in French, and her fictionalized likeness has appeared in a few novels in English. She’s been depicted in two Hollywood films, The Train (1964), starring Burt Lancaster, with a character based on her played by Suzanne Flon,¹ and The Monuments Men (2014), directed by George Clooney, in which a character based on her was portrayed by Cate Blanchett.²

By most accounts, Valland was unremarkable enough to fade into the background—a trait that served her particularly well when she began to act as a spy. Robert M. Edsel described her as “an unassuming but determined single woman with a forgettable bland style and manner” in The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History (2009). He credited her with providing crucial information that led the members of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section of the US Army—known as the Monuments Men—to the caves, salt mines, and castles where the Germans had stored looted art.³

After the war Valland waited more than a decade before recording her recollections of that period in her memoir, Le Front de l’art: Défense des collections françaises, 1939–1945 (1961). It received scant attention at the time, but it has since been used as crucial source material for historians like Lynn H. Nicholas, the author of The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (1994).

The publication of Valland’s memoir in an English translation by Ophélie Jouan may help to restore the little-known curator to her rightful place in the history of art looting during World War II. Captain James J. Rorimer, a leading figure in the Monuments Men, wrote in 1950:

The one person who above all others enabled us to track down the official Nazi art looters and to engage intelligently in that aspect of the whole picture was Mademoiselle Rose Valland, a rugged, painstaking and deliberate scholar.

All those attributes are on display in The Art Front, which provides a thoroughgoing record of the Nazi looting operation in France. Valland’s unassuming nature and extreme modesty are also evident, however, and they seem to hinder her ability to describe, much less trumpet, her important work. She never indulges in descriptions of her feelings and rarely explains how she conducted her espionage work, rendering her account unfortunately rather dry.

The Art Front begins in 1938, when the first convoy of art treasures from the Louvre departed for the Château de Chambord, one of many shipments of art from the national museums to the French countryside to protect them against a potential German air attack. But the real danger to France’s treasures, as it turned out, was not bombardment.

After Germany’s invasion in May 1940, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the head of the German Foreign Office, ordered the seizure of artworks from the homes and businesses of French Jewish collectors such as the Rothschilds and the art galleries of top dealers such as Georges Wildenstein and Paul Rosenberg, declaring them “ownerless.” At first the artworks were taken to an annex of the German embassy in the rue de Lille in Paris, where they came under the jurisdiction of Hitler’s special task force assigned to select artworks to remove to Germany for “safekeeping”: the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), led by Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazis’ chief ideologist.

When the quantities of art arriving at the embassy far exceeded expectations, the ERR’s representative in France, Kurt von Behr, was allotted three empty rooms at the Louvre, which also proved insufficient. Works of art “continued to pile up” at the Louvre until October 26, 1940, writes Valland. And “when an eighth convoy dropped off another load of furniture, rugs, statues, and paintings, von Behr realized the hitherto unsuspected importance of such an avalanche of riches and demanded more space.”

The Jeu de Paume, which had been built in 1862 as a sporting facility for a court game similar to tennis but converted into a museum in 1909, was just the kind of location the ERR was seeking. Valland, born in 1898, had been working there as a volunteer assistant curator for nearly a decade by that point. (Although she had graduated from the École du Louvre, as a woman she was not eligible for a paid position.) Von Behr, whom Valland describes as “tall and good-looking,” arrived in full dress uniform and a cap tipped sideways to throw a shadow over his face and hide a glass eye. The Germans immediately attempted to dismiss the museum’s French staff, but, Valland writes, “I did not think that this order applied to me. My intention was set; I decided to try to stay.” Unbeknownst to many of her contacts among the occupiers, she understood German.

The Art Front describes the arrival of German trucks laden with art, accompanied by military escorts, that “quickly transformed the atmosphere” of the museum: “Troops from the Luftwaffe carried in the crates and banged them around bluntly.” The unpacking of four hundred crates proceeded at such a pace that “inevitably, some were dropped on the floor. Soldiers stepped on others, but the order was to go as fast as possible! A magnificent portrait of a woman by Santerre sustained a long tear.” It had been stolen from the gallery of André Seligmann, who had fled to New York with his family some months earlier.

This striking historical moment passes all too quickly in Valland’s telling. What was she thinking as she watched all these seized artworks fill the Jeu de Paume’s halls? Which pictures did she see pass by? Was she afraid? She says she doesn’t know exactly why she was allowed to remain:

Probably because of some mundane conversation that followed, authorization was granted to me by this warlord [von Behr] to stay on at my former museum, which had now become his fiefdom.

Quickly Valland realized that there was to be an exhibition: Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second-in-command, was coming from Berlin to survey the spoils. Soon he also assumed authority over the ERR from Rosenberg and von Behr, in order to enrich himself and decorate his country estate, Carinhall, with his favorite artworks.

It is at this point that Valland’s espionage work must have begun, although she doesn’t specify in her memoir. As one of the few French civil servants with access to the Jeu de Paume, she was uniquely positioned to observe the Nazi theft of art from Jewish collections and attempts to rob national collections, and to notate when and where the works were shipped.

Before von Behr requisitioned the Jeu de Paume, the director of the French National Museums, Jacques Jaujard, had tried to negotiate with German officials to create “dual inventories,” one in German and one in French, as a record of all the works that moved through the ERR depot. Unsurprisingly, once installed, the Germans allowed no one from the French side to make an inventory. Valland kept hers in secret: “In the meantime, the circle closed so tightly around the Jeu de Paume that I did not appear to be anything other than a hostage.”

Reading her account, I wanted to find out when, where, and how she operated as a spy. Did she hide in corners or broom closets to jot down her notes? How did she present herself to Nazi officials in order to secure their trust? Did she slip out to deliver her valuable information to Jaujard at the Louvre? She doesn’t answer these questions in her book. Given its dispassionate objectivity, one wonders if it even makes sense to apply the term “memoir” to it.

Valland shares nothing about her private life; it’s as if she lived only in the Jeu de Paume. (In her 2016 book, Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved, and Died Under Nazi Occupation, Anne Sebba writes that after the war Valland lived with Joyce Helen Heer, a British translator and academic who worked at the US embassy in Paris.) For a memoir, her use of the pronoun “I” is very scant.

In a translator’s note, Jouan acknowledges that one of the complexities of conveying Valland’s meaning in English is this self-effacing quality. Valland adopted a “neutral and factual writing style” as a strategy “to limit the backlash” she may have anticipated while writing her memoir in the 1950s—a time when many of the major figures in the story were still alive—and she knew she was writing for “an informed public.” Jouan describes that era as a “time of Franco-German reconciliation,” suggesting that Valland’s depictions of German activities would be scrutinized by “both her museum colleagues and the former Nazis whom she had spied on.” Many of those figures, even by the 1950s, had faced few legal consequences for their actions during the war; some had been required to go through denazification procedures, and some had returned to the art trade.

Thus Valland’s focus was on objectivity. She positioned herself, Jouan writes, “not only as a witness but also as a historian of the 1938 to 1945 period,” reporting on events she did not experience firsthand but amply documented.

The original French text was “filled with innuendos and figures of speech,” explains Jouan, which she attempted to illuminate through footnotes. These do aid the reader to some degree, but not entirely; on many occasions, Valland’s summaries of ostensibly dramatic moments are frustratingly meager. She mentions, for example, that the Germans “caught me in the act once, when I was in the process of deciphering addresses,” without providing any context or details about the addresses in question. In the next sentence, all is resolved: “During the altercation that followed, I was able to convince them that it was not what it looked like.”

On the same page, Valland notes that the German authorities were planning to liquidate her. “I was supposed to be taken to Germany and then killed as soon as we crossed the border,” she writes again without giving any indication of how this affected her. The footnote explains that she learned this “during a legal confrontation” with the ERR member and Nazi art dealer Bruno Lohse in 1950.

Valland records Jaujard’s efforts to prevent the loss of art from French museums when Göring proposed art “exchanges.” According to Valland, Jaujard handled a tense conflict admirably and “managed to cap the number of exchanges requested by the Germans at ten.” In a particularly exhaustive section, she describes the wrangling over Gregor Erhart’s sixteenth-century wooden sculpture Saint Mary Magdalene from the Louvre. It eventually slipped through Jaujard’s hands and ended up in Germany.

The Art Front picks up its pace as the Germans become increasingly nervous about Allied advances. In July 1943 Valland witnessed a bonfire of some five or six hundred modernist paintings that the Nazis had deemed “degenerate” and not valuable enough to sell:

The fire was easily spotted in the interior garden of the Jeu de Paume Museum, where a jagged pyramid of frames and stretchers crackled in the flames. One could see by the light of the flames images that then disappeared in the fire.

One craves more information about the “images” Valland saw flickering in the smoke, or at least the names of some of the paintings by Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, and Joan Miró that were lost that day.

A mere ten pages describe Valland’s intrepid postwar work recovering looted art. She was appointed secretary to the hastily formed French Commission de Récupération Artistique, and she managed to convince Rorimer and his Monuments Men to track the stolen treasures into Bavaria, using a list of depots she had meticulously collected. She then joined the French First Army, quickly rising to the rank of captain.

Valland led missions to recover troves of art piled high at Buxheim monastery, Neuschwanstein castle, and Kurt von Behr’s castle at Benz, where the former ERR chief had committed suicide amid his spoils. (“His last dandy gesture was to drink the poison with 1918 vintage champagne,” Valland notes.) By the end of 1945 more than 1,400 crates filled with art were returned to the Jeu de Paume, in large part due to Valland’s espionage. She is credited with saving somewhere between 20,000 and 60,000 artworks. For her work, France named her an officer of the Légion d’honneur and awarded her the Médaille de la Résistance.

“I felt a sense of responsibility to these collections,” she writes. “During the war, I had devoted myself entirely to gathering information regarding their fate that—I hoped—would enable their recovery and facilitate their restitution.” Her report from the front lines of the art battle helps us understand the debt of gratitude that art lovers and historians owe her—even if she may have been too modest.