On June 10, 1940, sur­round­ed by Ger­man forces, Paris was declared an open city to save the metrop­o­lis from dam­age by bombs and artillery fire. The French faced two options: to go along with the Ger­man occu­pa­tion, or to resist. Resis­tance took many forms, but one of the most unusu­al was that tak­en by Rose Val­land, a cura­tor at the Jeu de Paume muse­um, who appoint­ed her­self the guardian of France’s art her­itage and did every­thing pos­si­ble to delay and stop the loot­ing of art that was going on all around her.

In The Art Spy, Michelle Young tells the long-over­looked sto­ry of Val­land and her work spy­ing on the Ger­mans, keep­ing records of all the art col­lec­tions that were stolen, and where those works went. Young inter­laces Valland’s sto­ry with that of Paul Rosenberg’s fam­i­ly, includ­ing his son, Alexan­dre Rosen­berg, one of the most famous and wealth­i­est art deal­ers in Paris, with a gallery that showed works by Picas­so, Braque, Matisse, Degas, Renoir, Van Gogh, Mon­et, Cezanne, and manyother mod­ern artists. Paul escaped to Amer­i­ca, but he lost not only the art left in his gallery in Paris, but his house and all of its fur­nish­ings and art. Alexan­dre joined the Free French forces and was among those who lib­er­at­ed Paris. Val­land record­ed the Ger­mans’ theft of the Rosen­berg col­lec­tion and those of oth­er Jew­ish art deal­ers and col­lec­tors, includ­ing the Rothschilds.

Valland’s work brought her into con­tact with high-rank­ing Nazis like Reichs­marschall Her­man Göring, who con­fis­cat­ed art for his own col­lec­tion, and Kurt von Behr and Bruno Lohse, who were in charge of steal­ing works for Hitler’s planned Führermu­se­um in Linz, Aus­tria, his birth­place. She secret­ly worked against the Ger­mans in any way she pos­si­bly could, often risk­ing her life to do so. In addi­tion to keep­ing records of the stolen art, she doc­u­ment­ed the destruc­tion of ​“deca­dent art” by the Ger­mans and urged fel­low work­ers to make ​“mis­takes” to slow down the pack­ing and ship­ping process.

At the end of the war, as the Free French moved to lib­er­ate Paris, Rose joined with the Resis­tance to pre­vent a train loaded with stolen art from reach­ing Ger­many. This sto­ry was lat­er made into the movie The Train, star­ring Burt Lan­cast­er. Valland’s sto­ry deserves to be told and Young has done a metic­u­lous job of research­ing and writ­ing this book.