THE ART SPY

The Nazis’ systematic looting of art treasures in occupied France and some who battled against it.

The book focuses on Rose Valland, a curator at the Jeu de Paume museum who remained at her post throughout World War II to document the hundreds of thousands of artworks seized by the Nazis (principally but not exclusively belonging to French Jews), but substantial secondary passages follow the odysseys of art dealer Paul Rosenberg and his son Alexandre. U.S. Army lieutenant James Rorimer makes a late entrance to avail himself of Valland’s meticulous record-keeping to track looted art into Germany in the waning days of the war and save it from destruction by the vengeful Nazis. Journalist and architecture professor Young does a reasonable job of blending these stories into a compelling narrative. It is occasionally jarring, however, to be yanked from the repulsive spectacle of opportunistic art dealers and greedy Nazi officials (Hermann Göring first among them) picking through priceless art collections into the story of the Rosenberg family’s circuitous flight from France to the United States and Alexandre’s enlistment with the Free French Forces that liberated Paris in 1944. Granted, Paul Rosenberg’s unparalleled collection of modern art was one of the Nazis’ principal targets, but detailing his anxieties about Alexandre and the young man’s military service detracts from the remarkable story of Valland, a formidable woman who managed to convince the Germans she was a nondescript bureaucrat who could be useful to them, all the while eavesdropping on their conversations (they didn’t know she spoke German) and covertly writing down every scrap of information she could glean from coded shipping labels or carbon copies fished from trash cans. Young is rightly indignant that Valland’s reputation was later smeared by people anxious to cover up their participation in the looting, most notably German art historian Bruno Lohse, who identified targets for Göring but managed to rehabilitate himself after the war.

Vivid popular history spotlighting a neglected heroine.