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Rose Valland (1898–1980) was a French art historian, whose courageous intelligence-gathering during World War II enabled the post-war recovery of a vast number of fine and decorative art from Jewish private collections which had been looted by the Nazis [Fig. 1].
Born in the small town of Saint-Etienne-de-Saint-Geoirs, between Grenoble and Lyon, Valland’s determination and passion for art led her — at a time when women in higher education were still a rarity — to complete a doctorate in Art History as well as degrees in education and fine art. After a teacher-training course in Grenoble and art school in Lyon, Rose moved to Paris in 1922, where she continued her education at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (National Art School), the École du Louvre and Sorbonne University [Fig. 2]. Valland lived at 4 Rue de Navarre near the Jardin des Plantes in Paris [Fig. 3] with her life partner Dr Joyce Heer (1911-1977), a British classicist and translator at the US Embassy in Paris.
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ACADEMIC LIFE
In the years before, during and after World War II, Valland’s life would become closely entwined with the Jeu de Paume, a 19th-century building situated on a corner of the Tuileries Gardens — where the Rue de Rivoli meets the Place de la Concorde [Fig. 4].
Despite her outstanding academic achievement, Valland was turned down for a role at the Louvre. In 1932, she was offered an unpaid position at the Musée National des Écoles Étrangères Contemporaines (National Museum for Contemporary Foreign Art), which had been located at the Jeu de Paume since 1922. Together with the museum’s director, André Dézarrois (1889-1979), Valland worked on the organisation of major pre-war exhibitions, including Origines et Developpement de l’Art International Independant (Origins and Development of Independent International Art) in 1937 [Fig. 5-7]. Her role, which also involved collection management and contributing to exhibition catalogues, exposed her to the work of major artists of her day and brought her into contact with leading art dealers.
Alongside her museum role, Rose Valland published art criticism and supplemented her income through art teaching, talks and tours. By the late 1930s, Valland also acted as an intermediary in the sale of paintings, brokering the sale of works by the likes of Juan Gris and Fernand Léger from the collection of Pierre Faure. Around 1933, Faure had begun to sell works from his collection through the art dealers Louis Carré (1897–1977), Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884-1979) and Pierre Loeb (1897–1964), as well as the artist Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968). Léger’s 1918 painting La gare, formerly in the Faure collection, was in Rose Valland’s possession by May 1939. In 1944, it was sold to Louis Carré, after which it was acquired by the artist’s wife, Nadia Léger (1904–1982) [Fig. 8].
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ACADEMIC LIFE
In the years before, during and after World War II, Valland’s life would become closely entwined with the Jeu de Paume, a 19th-century building situated on a corner of the Tuileries Gardens — where the Rue de Rivoli meets the Place de la Concorde [Fig. 4].
Despite her outstanding academic achievement, Valland was turned down for a role at the Louvre. In 1932, she was offered an unpaid position at the Musée National des Écoles Étrangères Contemporaines (National Museum for Contemporary Foreign Art), which had been located at the Jeu de Paume since 1922. Together with the museum’s director, André Dézarrois (1889-1979), Valland worked on the organisation of major pre-war exhibitions, including Origines et Developpement de l’Art International Independant (Origins and Development of Independent International Art) in 1937 [Fig. 5-7]. Her role, which also involved collection management and contributing to exhibition catalogues, exposed her to the work of major artists of her day and brought her into contact with leading art dealers.
Alongside her museum role, Rose Valland published art criticism and supplemented her income through art teaching, talks and tours. By the late 1930s, Valland also acted as an intermediary in the sale of paintings, brokering the sale of works by the likes of Juan Gris and Fernand Léger from the collection of Pierre Faure. Around 1933, Faure had begun to sell works from his collection through the art dealers Louis Carré (1897–1977), Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884-1979) and Pierre Loeb (1897–1964), as well as the artist Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968). Léger’s 1918 painting La gare, formerly in the Faure collection, was in Rose Valland’s possession by May 1939. In 1944, it was sold to Louis Carré, after which it was acquired by the artist’s wife, Nadia Léger (1904–1982) [Fig. 8].
'The arrival of German trucks loaded with works of art from either the Louvre or the embassy, with a military escort, quickly transformed the atmosphere that surrounded me. Rooms and offices were immediately taken over. Troops from the Luftwaffe carried in the crates and banged them about bluntly. The walls were used to hearing other kinds of echoes. Unpacking began the next morning.'
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Rose Valland’s life changed dramatically with the beginning of Nazi Germany’s occupation of Paris in June 1940. From 1 November 1940, the Nazi looting agency Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), which had been active in Paris from September, used the Jeu de Paume as its central storage and triage site. Rose Valland was the only member of the French curatorial staff allowed to stay on at the museum, carrying out the now-legendary work of meticulously documenting the movements of thousands of looted artworks from national and private French collections [Fig. 9]. Thanks to her understanding of German — an ability that the Nazis were unaware she had — Valland was able to gather critical information on the identity and destinations of looted cultural property that passed through the Jeu de Paume. This essential knowledge enabled many of these pieces to be tracked down and recovered after the war [Fig. 10, 11].
Throughout the war, Valland sent notes reporting on the goings-on at the Jeu de Paume to Jacques Jaujard (1895–1967), the Director of the French National Museums, who was in contact with the French Resistance [Fig. 12, 13]. In her memoirs, Le front de l’art: Défense des collections françaises, 1939–1945, she describes the atmosphere at the Jeu de Paume and how she went about gathering data:
‘Everything that I was seeing and hearing ended up in the file of my memory and notes, an important repository of information in my efforts to find out as much as possible about the ERR’s plans and operations. I had to be vigilant and retain every bit of it in my mind, because one never knows in the moment the detail that will matter later.’
Impressionist paintings — and modernist artworks considered to be ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis — were stored in a separate room at the Jeu de Paume, often referred to as the ‘Salle des Martyrs’ [Fig. 14]. While some of these artworks were sold off or became currency in exchanges against Old Masters coveted by the Nazis, others are said to have been destroyed.
The ERR staff left the Jeu de Paume in mid-August of 1944 and in the chaotic days leading up to the liberation of Paris on 25 August, Rose Valland kept watch at the building, which was located near the headquarters of the German military administration, an area that would see intense fighting. A tip-off by Valland enabled the French Resistance to divert and intercept the last train loaded by the ERR with looted artworks — predominantly modern paintings — at Aulnay-sous-Bois on the outskirts of Paris [Fig. 15].
On 24 November 1944, the Commission de Récuperation Artistique (French Commission on Art Recovery) was established at the Jeu de Paume, with Rose Valland appointed as secretary [Fig. 16]. Valland was impatient to travel to Germany, convinced of the urgent need to locate and protect the depots where the Nazis had stored the cultural property they had looted in France. She shared her intelligence on the locations of ERR depots with James J. Rorimer (1905-1966) of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section, who would reach Neuschwanstein Castle with the Seventh US Army on 28 April 1945.
From May 1945, Valland’s attachments to the French and US Armies made it possible for her to travel to Germany, first to the French occupation zone and later to the US occupation zone, where the major ERR storage depots — including Neuschwanstein Castle — were located [Fig. 17]. In April 1946, Valland was appointed director of the fine arts section at France’s cultural affairs division in Berlin and later, between June 1949 and the end of 1951, headed the Service de Remise en Place des Oeuvres d’Art (Department for the Return of Works of Art).
For almost a decade, Rose travelled tirelessly across post-war Germany, under difficult conditions, recovering artworks which had been looted from French national and private collections during the war. In these years, she would work closely with other Monuments Men and Women including Jean Rigaud, Edith Standen, Ardelia Hall and Lane Faison, among others [Fig.18-20]. Upon returning to France in 1953, Rose was promoted by France's national museums to the position of curator and became director of the Service de Protection d’Oeuvres d’Art (Department for the Protection of Works of Art).
‘I used any excuse I could to move around the building, from the valid reason that there were foreign contemporary collections from my former museum to the monitoring of electrical installations or fire stations. More than anything else, it was important to find out what the Germans were doing with the looted works of art — whether in Paris or in the Reich — so that one day we could search for them and return them to France. When it became obvious that the castle of Neuschwanstein in Füssen, where the first convoys from France had gone, was in essence a marshalling yard and that there were additional sites, I focused my attention on locating the other Nazi art depots.’
‘I used any excuse I could to move around the building, from the valid reason that there were foreign contemporary collections from my former museum to the monitoring of electrical installations or fire stations. More than anything else, it was important to find out what the Germans were doing with the looted works of art — whether in Paris or in the Reich — so that one day we could search for them and return them to France. When it became obvious that the castle of Neuschwanstein in Füssen, where the first convoys from France had gone, was in essence a marshalling yard and that there were additional sites, I focused my attention on locating the other Nazi art depots.’
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In 1961, Valland published her memoirs titled Le Front de l’Art [Fig. 21]. In the first section of the book, written in a clear and dispassionate style, she described the packing up and placing into storage of France’s national art collections as World War II approached [Fig. 22]. In the second part, she gave an account of the Nazi art looting of French Jewish collections between 1940 and 1944, and of what she had witnessed at the Jeu de Paume. The third section described the post-war recovery efforts. Valland continued to work on restitution cases even after her retirement in 1968 and donated her papers, which are today held in the French Diplomatic Archives. Rose Valland died in 1980.
In recognition for her work both during and after the war, Valland was awarded several honours, including the medal of the French Resistance (1946), the US Presidential Medal of Freedom (1948), Ordre des Arts et de Lettres, Officer and Commander grades (1960), the Légion d’Honneur (1969) and the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (1972).
In the late 1990s, the opening of wartime archives, new research and a renewal of awareness relating to World War II spoliation led to a resurgence of interest in Rose Valland’s life and work. New editions of Le Front de l’Art were published in 1997 and 2014. On 27 April 2005, a plaque in honour of Rose Valland was unveiled at the Jeu de Paume [Fig. 23], followed in 2014 by a commemorative plaque at her former residence on rue de Navarre in Paris. Since the late 1990s, Valland has become the subject of a growing number of books, including academic publications, fiction and graphic novels, as well as exhibitions and plays. Valland’s hopes for a translation of Le Front de l’Art into English were not realised during her lifetime. In November 2024, an English translation of this important book is being published by the Monuments Men and Women Foundation with the support of Christie's.
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