Meet the woman who saved countless art masterpieces from the Nazis

Valland is the real-life heroine of “The Art Spy,” a curator at Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris in the 1940s.

We’ll never know about all the paintings destroyed or stolen by the Nazis in World War II. Were there forgotten Vermeers? Trashed Picassos? But what we do know is that a woman named Rose Valland saved tens of thousands of works.

Valland is the real-life heroine of “The Art Spy,” a curator at Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris in the 1940s. Unpaid because she was a woman, Villand nevertheless treasured the priceless works in her care. When Hermann Göring and other Nazis began using it and the Louvre for lavish “shopping” trips to line the walls of their homes or Hitler’s planned art museum, she decided, as Michelle Young writes, “her role, even if small, would be to save what might remain of the beauty left in the world.”

How did she pull it off? Essentially, her cover was that she was too dull for the Nazis to suspect her of scheming against them during the war and, afterwards, spending years attempting to get the stolen Rembrandts and Matisses back to their rightful owners.

Valland’s story has been told before (Cate Blanchett played a version of her in “The Monuments Men”) but one intriguing wrinkle in “Art Spy” is that Valland was a lesbian, which Young contends helps prepare the curator for cover action: “Rose had additionally kept her sexuality private for most of her life, and in her new role as a spy, she would need to pull on that cloak of invisibility even more.”

Novel offers fresh elements to Rose’s story

The other fresh element of “Art Spy” is that Young juxtaposes Rose’s story with that of wealthy-heir-turned-Allied-soldier Alexandre Rosenberg, whose Jewish family fled Paris and had their mammoth art collection ripped from the walls of their home. Even in her own memoir, Valland offered scant details of her life, but Rosenberg is a larger-than-life figure whose story climaxes with a discovery so incredible that it’ll have you checking Young’s sources to make sure it’s true.

Shifting between Valland and Rosenberg gives “Art Spy” a cinematic momentum, and the stakes could hardly be higher. The book is filled with dizzying lists like this one, of a vault Nazis broke into: “33 paintings by Picasso, 15 by Braque, 21 by Matisse, 13 by Marie Laurencin, five by Degas, 10 Renoirs, eight Corots, seven Bonnards, five Monets and 50 others by Van Gogh, Cezanne, Delacroix, Ingres, Gericault, Pissarro and others.”

Many works were never found or deliberately destroyed by the Nazis as it became clear the war was lost. It’s believed they looted about 650,000 artworks, 100,000 of them from France (61,000 of which Valland and her team restored to their owners).

It’s not overstating the case to say the international art scene would be very different were it not for Valland — who, incidentally, also was finishing her doctoral thesis while hiding her longtime relationship, saving thousands of priceless masterworks and pulling the wool over the eyes of Nazis. Lucidly written by Young, “The Art Spy” demonstrates that, without Valland, today’s visitors to Paris would have a lot less to see.