Nothing to see here in Rose Valland, whose conservative dress and meek demeanor made her easy to overlook as a 40-something French woman during World War II.
Look closer. Or dig deep as Michelle Young did in archives, documents and scraps of paper to write “The Art Spy.” The historical narrative, published last year, chronicles the five years Valland helped take down a Nazi art looting ring by spying as a civil servant in a small museum near the Louvre.
Young will join host Cathy Lewis at 2 p.m. on Saturday at the Chrysler Museum of Art’s Kaufman Theater for a 1-hour conversation as part of the museum's Creative Minds series.
“The Art Spy” is a multi-award winner and one of five finalists for the Marfield Prize National Award for Arts Writing.
In the 11 months since the book was released, Young has toured to share Valland’s legacy.
“I don’t think I could have imagined it would be this way,” said Young, who has been a guest on CSPAN, featured in the Boston Globe and Christian Science Monitor, and a speaker at the U.S. Embassy in Paris. “I did hope there would be potential for people on a large scale to discover Rose’s story.”
At the beginning of WWII in the late 1930s, Nazis plundered museums and Jewish-held collections, looting 650,000 pieces of art across Europe. That included paintings considered “degenerate,” their word for modernist art that Nazi ruler Adolf Hitler abhorred.
Valland was an unpaid assistant curator before and during the war at the Jeu de Paume. When the museum became a clearinghouse for stolen art, Valland secretly kept detailed notes with the help of her photographic memory and knowledge of German. Valland was not proficient in the language, but relied on her romantic partner, Joyce Heer, for translations.
“Rose was able to recognize paintings and artists and would report what was being stolen, who was coming into the museum and what was going on to her boss, who was part of the French Resistance,” Young said.
Valland stowed her notes, photocopies and negatives of photographs — the Nazis often took selfies beside significant paintings — in her apartment, which was never searched. Nobody suspected the masculine-looking woman who kept to herself of harboring secrets.
Valland and her team saved more than 60,000 pieces of French art, including paintings by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.
“It’s really all the big names in art that you can imagine," Young said. "The Nazis took everything.”
Young's path to becoming an author was anything but linear.
In 2009, the Harvard-educated entrepreneur founded Untapped New York, an online magazine that has morphed into a tour company highlighting the hidden gems of the city.
Using her undergraduate degree in art history wasn’t top-of-mind. She was drawn to architecture and earned a master’s in urban planning from Columbia University. As an adjunct professor there, Young enjoyed freelance writing and has bylines in Business Insider, Food and Wine and The Guardian.
But in her downtime, the rural western New York resident buries herself in World War II books with a penchant toward female-spy thrillers. When she came across Valland’s name in “Göring’s Man in Paris,” a biography of a Nazi art plunderer, she became intent on learning more.
Young’s sleuthing started at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and then Washington, D.C., and a few weeks later, France, aided by her French husband, who was able to help her navigate the archives.
Visiting Valland’s hometown, where the one-woman Rose Valland Association is located, was fruitful. Valland had no direct descendants, but Young was able to connect with the granddaughter of Valland’s cousin, who had saved correspondence from the time.
“Those are a lot of the letters I quote when you hear Rose’s thoughts in the book,” Young said.
Nothing in “The Art Spy” is conjecture. Young’s tedious documentation, initially 2,000 notes, is condensed to 53 pages. One note exists for each line of dialogue.
“This is a work of nonfiction and nothing in this book was imagined,” reads the author’s note.
That includes confirmation of the Nazis burning hundreds of paintings in a fire at the Jeu de Paume, a scene Valland witnessed in horror. She documented the lost art, paintings by Picasso, Fernand Léger, Paul Klee and Max Ernst, to name a few.
Understanding that the Nazis would likely deny the act, Valland took a step that Young uncovered. Four guards witnessed the fire. All submitted sworn testimony that Valland kept as a record, evidence Young found in forgotten boxes.
“That was rewarding,” she said.
Valland did write her story, panned for reading more like an academic paper than a memoir and described by one critic as “a detached narrative.” While Young would love to see a TV series or film based on “The Art Spy,” she is thrilled that her book creates awareness about a neglected heroine.
Valland died in 1980 at the age of 82. She received a number of national and military honors, including the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“She doesn’t fit the mold of what we think of as a spy,” Young said. “I hope it’s inspiring to people who might think, ‘Wow! Maybe I can make a difference.’”
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