It was the most incendiary moment of French Resistance spy Rose Valland’s life: the summer day in 1943 when she watched the Nazis knife, stomp on, and burn around 500 paintings by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and André Masson in the courtyard of the Jeu de Paume, in Paris. From the large ground-floor windows and glass doors of the museum, Valland tried to hide her abject horror. Over and over, she would see a flash of a painting and then watch it melt away, the frames and canvases crackling and snapping under the flames as a column of smoke billowed into the sky.
Valland, the subject of my new book, The Art Spy, was a curator with the Musées Nationaux before joining the French Resistance, working undercover inside the Nazis’ Paris-looting headquarters, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (E.R.R.), led by Alfred Rosenberg and Hermann Göring. At great risk to her life, she documented the Nazis’ large-scale plunder in detail, surreptitiously stole important documents, and sabotaged their work.
