Rose Antonia Valland was born in 1898 in a village near Grenoble, the daughter of a blacksmith. She was a clever scholarship child, winning places at a variety of specialist colleges with the plan of becoming an art teacher. She studied both art and art-teacher training, coming top in one of the competitive exams, and continued studying art history until 1931 when she graduated with a special diploma from the Ecole du Louvre. Finally, aged thirty-four, Valland became a volunteer assistant curator at the Jeu de Paume but, in spite of her myriad qualifications, as a woman she was not eligible for a paid curator’s job. By 1941, the ERR was appropriating whatever it could, its job made easier by another law of April that year which gave provisional administrators – officials installed by the Occupation authorities ‘to eradicate the Jewish influence on the French economy’ – the power to sell Jewish enterprises to Aryans or to liquidate them, with the proceeds going to the state. ‘Thus a number of Frenchmen [in the occupied zone only at first] became beneficiaries of an act of spoliation no less direct than the Rosenberg office seizure of Jewish art treasures in Paris at the same time.’ Jacques Jaujard, Director of the Musées Nationaux, did what he could to protect Jewish art that had been given to his directorate either as a gift or for safekeeping.
But his protests were largely ignored and, besides the rapacious Germans, French criminal gangs infiltrated as middlemen or informers wherever they saw a possible deal. But once the Nazis had taken over the Jeu de Paume it was Jaujard who ordered Valland to stay on and administer the building. She was there every day for the next four years – other than on four occasions when she was ordered to leave. Each time she managed to return. ‘I still don’t understand today,’ she wrote in her 1961 memoir, ‘why I was selected. But once asked, I was determined never to leave. I had no doubt what I had to do.’ She was subjected to gruelling questioning from time to time when things went missing, but the most she ever said later about this was that it was ‘very disagreeable’.
Effectively, Valland became a spy. Probably the Germans thought the dowdy, bespectacled academic posed no threat, or else they were distracted by other matters and largely ignored her. But although she could no longer openly take note of what came in or out, from March 1941 Valland secretly recorded everything she could, sometimes using shorthand, sometimes ‘borrowing’ overnight negatives of artwork that had been photographed and surreptitiously returning them, copied, the next morning. She also listened to everything (her ability to understand German helped), in order to send regular reports to Jaujard or his assistants, who had close links with the resistance. Valland noted absolutely everything she observed, not just cataloguing the looted art but recording details every day about who was packing or who was guarding, where the crates were going and when individual Nazis were coming to Paris. She even described the personal intrigues, of which there were many.
As the ERR swelled to a staff of at least sixty, Valland also cast her disapproving eye over all the complicated love affairs developing against a backdrop of increasing madness and secrecy. ‘Colonel von Behr had to get rid of his mistress, Mlle Puz, when the Baronne, his real wife, turned up,’ she wrote on one occasion. The glass-eyed Baron Kurt von Behr, chief of the ERR, was a notorious womanizer and, since the Baronne was English, matters were even more complicated. When Anne-Marie Tomforde married the ERR business manager, Lieutenant Hermann von Ingram, Valland wrote that ‘the young bride did not hesitate to fill her trousseau with objects from various confiscated Jewish collections and to take pieces of furniture from the Rothschild collection or a tea service from the David Weill collection’.
In this sinister atmosphere, in which Jewish dealers were mostly exiled or in hiding, Jewish artists described as degenerate, and the Pariser Zeitung – a newspaper conceived, written and handed out by Germans, which made its first appearance in Paris in January 1941 – regularly contained articles glorifying German art and describing all modern art as decadent, it took rare courage for galleries to exhibit works the Nazis decried and openly to support banned artists.