Glossary
ERR (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg) - A looting group created by Alfred Rosenberg, initially their goal was to collect archives, books, and other Jewish cultural goods to examine and develop anti-Jewish studies. In 1940 they became a plundering group for all types of valuables from their "enemies" when the seizure of cultural holdings - ranging from art pieces to antique furniture - was authorised by the Führer.
Reichsmarschall - Second in command to Hitler, a position created for Herman Göring who was commander of the Luftwaffe and an avid art collector. He made sure to take thousands of the looted pieces for his private art collection - going as far as stealing from Hitler.
MFA&A - The Monuments, Fine Art and Archives Division of the Allied Forces created in the United States. Members of other Allied countries, mainly from the United Kingdom and France made up the division with both men and women having important ranks in it.
Born in the commune of Saint-Étienne-de-Saint-Geoirs in France, Rose Valland (1898-1980) is - in my humble opinion - one of the most important women in art history, despite not being an artist herself. Volunteering as an art historian and assistant curator at the Jeu de Paume, Valland's job consisted of cataloguing artworks housed at the museum. The first record of her work at the Jeu de Paume was in 1933 of the painting 'Paysage' by Else Berg, acquired by the French government. Berg was a Dutch woman with both German and Jewish heritage - an intriguing coincidence considering the work that Mademoiselle Valland would carry out in the years to come.
Paris, previously a beacon for cultural development, became a central location for the Nazi government. There the ERR catalogued much of the art plunder before shipping it to hidden locations around the Third Reich. Modern databases tell historians that 20% of all art in Europe was stolen by the Nazi regime. While most remain missing, from the 10% that were recovered by the Allied army, much was only found because of the list put together by Rose Valland. She was the only French worker kept at Jeu de Paume after the Nazi occupation of France. Undermined for being a woman, she was able to work from the inside in favour of the French resistance and continue her previous work with a new motivation: cataloguing to save European culture.
Life before the War
Little is known about her personal life before the period during which she volunteered and later worked at the museum. However, something known to those that study her story is the fact she was queer. To twentieth century standards, Valland was an "out and proud" lesbian. After the war she shared an apartment in Paris with her partner, author Joyce Heer, and they were buried together in the Valland family crypt. Paris in the 1920s and 1930s was a centre for the lesbian community, but during the war they were forced to hide. Sadly, little of the Parisian lesbian subculture survived the Occupation.
Valland was extremely well educated in the arts, having studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and Lyon as well as studying art history at the École du Louvre and at the Sorbonne Université. Regardless of her large number of academic achievements, she began her career at the Jeu de Paume as a volunteer - only receiving her first paid position during the Occupation. The atmosphere of the heritage world after the Great War and the fears of the war to come were well noticed by the art historian - something she wrote about in her book 'Le Front de L'Art: Défense de Collection Française' (1961).
Valland wrote about the pre-war preparations that took place both at the Jeu de Paume and the Louvre under orders of the Director of French National Museums, Jacques Jaujard, who already faced the perils that the previous war had posed to the cultural world. She describes how the staff of Parisian museums began to 'box up' the valuable paintings and statues so they could be sent to safe locations and, the more noble ones - such as the Mona Lisa - were hidden around the country. In 1938, Jaujard trusted Valland with the responsibility of overseeing the collections and running the Jeu de Paume whilst the curator was ill. She remained in the position as, not long after, in 1940, Nazi forces occupied Paris.
The Occupation
Throughout her book 'Le Front de L'Art: Défense des Collections Françaises' (1961), Valland describes that soon after the Nazis took over Paris they began to remove French workers from governmental and civil work positions - this included museum officials. However, she was able to stay employed throughout the entire war period - regardless of their many attempts to fire her. Nonetheless, they undermined her for being a woman, believing she would be compliant and obedient. They were unaware that not only did she quickly understand their cataloguing system and began one of her own, but also that she understood German, listening in on all of the officers' conversations about plans and information on the Reich.
During the four years of occupation, Valland kept a careful log of the large collection of art pieces that passed through the Jeu de Paume. The pieces were divided between the private collections of the Führer, the Reischmarschall's and the pieces chosen for the Linz Museum Project. She recorded the artist, the provenance, and the title of the pieces - the ones that were kept and the ones considered degenerate by Nazi officials, which were destroyed. Valland filled books with this information, which would become some of the most important files for the Allied forces.
Valland also achieved what many believed impossible: she uncovered six of the locations the ERR sent their plunder for 'safe-keeping'. These were five castles - Neuschwanstein, Köge, Nickolsburg, Chiemsee and the Seiseinegg - and the Kloster Buxheim Monastery. They also used of salt mines located around the Third Reich. The only art that was not kept in any of these places was Göring's personal collection, which made the pieces he selected harder to locate. Her thorough research into the Nazi's own illegal art market, was one of the main reasons as to why the MFA&A were able to locate and repatriate around 60,000 pieces of stolen art - with 20,000 alone being found at Neuschwanstein Castle.
Beaux-Art Captain Valland
As the war neared its end, the Allied forces created the MFA&A - later receiving their famous nickname: the Monuments Men. A division formed by art historians, museum officials, architects and artists of all calibre composed by both men and women. A division that understood the threat faced by art and culture and were determined to save, restore, and repatriate the lost art. Rose Valland became invaluable to this division, as she held both the up-to-date information and deep knowledge of art.
Like most professional organisations of the time, the MFA&A was mainly composed of men, but they had women in high ranks and working in important roles in the army. While they did not go to the front and fight to recover the plundered art, they were responsible with completing provenance research, organisation of restitution documents and helped analyse and locate Nazi hiding spots so platoons could go out and look for the loot.
Rose Valland was one of these important women. Though she was not part of the MFA&A, she enlisted and became part of the French First Army in 1945 to continuously work for the safeguarding and return of art - granting her a Captain rank in the French army. She worked closely with the Allied division and became close with several members - describing in her book the friendship with Lieutenant James Rorimer, curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as one with complete trust between them. He was the one to whom she entrusted her list.
For her efforts in assisting in recovering tens of thousands works of art, as well as her work during the war years, she received a series of medals and became the most decorated woman in the French Army. In the Monuments Men and Women website (which only changed its title to include 'Women' in 2022), she is listed to have received: the Legion of Honor, the Medal of the Résistance, the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, became Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters appointed by the French government and, in 1948, she was awarded the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom. Even though she received several military medals throughout the years, she was only recognised as a professional and granted the official work title of art curator in 1953.
Overlooked but not forgotten
While Rose Valland might not (yet) be part of World War II discussions in academia, she certainly has not been entirely left out of the narrative. Films, biographies and books about her continue to be published. At the Jeu de Paume, a plaque was placed to honour her work and in Lyon an exhibition was put together presenting her story. All of this shows that her importance has not been entirely forgotten. Captain Valland might be remembered by few but with these acts she is able to come to life a little more through every new representation.
In cinema she has been represented in two films, The Train (1964) and The Monuments Men (2014) but, in both feature films, her actions were diminished. The most recent film, which used Valland for character inspiration, even put the character back in the closet through an attempt of creating a romantic narrative with the Rorimer inspired character. Hollywood's change in her identity to construct - what they believe to be - an "interesting" narrative shows how little research was done on Valland and her importance and participation in the war efforts.
An exhibition named Le Dame du Jeu de Paume was curated in 2009 and displayed through to 2010 at the CHRD (Centre d'Histoire de la Résistance et de la Déportation) in Lyon, portraying the history of the art curator and her importance to France. A few books worth mentioning that have been published are her own, Le Front de L'Art (1961) that had a new edition printed in 2014 - with two articles and photos being added to the print -, Le Carnet des Rose Valland (2011) by Emmanuelle Pollack, which unites all of her manuscripts in one publication, and the most recent Rose Valland, l'espionne à l'oeuvre (2023) by Jennifer Lesieur, a biography about Valland's life and impact in art history.
Even though the majority of the publications about her originate in France, many of the French themselves are not familiar with one of their national heroes. I was recently in a bookshop in Paris hunting down Valland's book and other pieces written about her and upon asking one of the shopkeepers whether they had it in stock, they wrote her name down incorrectly when checking. Her book about the war period stopped being published a few years after it was first released and - even though Valland expressed a desire to do so - it was never translated into English, something that diminished the outreach of her important work.
The Saviour of Culture
When the history and culture of Europe was at risk of being lost forever, Rose Valland made sure that this heritage would not disappear. A task that seemed impossible to complete, her efforts to continuously keep art safe and where it belonged is one of the biggest legacies left by Valland. She participated largely in the work for restitution of looted artworks for the French and Jewish families all over Europe. Captain Valland must be remembered and presented to the public. Without her, it is likely that tens of thousands of artworks would have been forever lost because of looting during the war.
Further reading
Campbell, Elizabeth. 2021. ‘Monuments Women and Men: Rethinking Popular Narratives via British Major Anne Olivier Popham’, International Journal of Cultural Property, 28.3: 409–24 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0940739121000308
Centre d'Histoire de la Résistance et de la Déportation. 2010. ‘La Dame Du Jeu de Paume’, CHRD | Musée d’Histoire | Lyon Dans La Guerre, 1939-1945 https://www.chrd.lyon.fr/chrd/edito-musee/la-dame-du-jeu-de-paume
Christie's. 2023. ‘Celebrating the Contributions of Women in Art Restitution, on the 25th Anniversary of the Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art’, Christie’s https://www.christies.com/features/celebrating-the-contributions-of-women-in-art-restitution-12668-1.aspx
ERR Project. 2015. ‘Cultural Plunder by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR): Database of Art Objects at the Jeu de Paume’, Errproject.org https://www.errproject.org/jeudepaume/about/err.php
Flanner, Janet. 1947. ‘The Beautiful Spoils - Collector with Luftwaffe’, The New Yorker (Condé Nast) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1947/03/08/the-beautiful-spoils-3
‘Valland, Capt. Rose | Monuments Men and Women | Monuments Men Foundation’. [n.d.]. Monuments Men and Women Foundation https://www.monumentsmenandwomenfnd.org/valland-capt-rose
Valland, Rose. 2016. Le Front de l’Art : Défense Des Collections Françaises : 1939-1945 (Paris: Réunion Des Musées Nationaux)