VALLAND Rose (EN)

Rosa Antonia Valland, known as Rose Valland, was born 1 November 1898 in Saint-Étienne-de-Saint-Geoirs in the Isère department. She was an active resistant and became curator in the Musées nationaux, her career lasting from 1932-1968.

Training at the Jeu de Paume Museum

After primary school in her native region of the Dauphiné, Rose Valland entered the École nationale des beaux-arts in Lyon (1918-1922), then the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris (1922-1925), followed by studies at the École du Louvre (1922-1927). Her university career, exceptional for a young woman of her social class, continued at the Institut d’art et d’archéologie (1924-1927) and the École pratique des hautes études (1925-1938). During her training, she first specialized in the early Italian art, before studying Greek archeology, then modern art.

These studies were precious during the war for identifying the “degenerate” artworks that transited through the Jeu de Paume. After several candidacies proposed in vain to museum institutions, she obtained a post there as volunteer secretary in February 1932, shortly before the 23 December re-opening of the institution as the musée des Écoles étrangères contemporaines (Museum of contemporary foreign Schools). Rose Valland thus became the assistant to the curator of the Jeu de Paume, André Dezarrois (1889-1979), which led her to be responsible for a great variety of missions, including the management of routine administrative affairs, organization of exhibitions, drafting of catalogs, inventories of artworks, etc.

The rapid pace of artistic events, especially of vernissages, highly prized by the Parisian intellectual and artistic elite, gave her a good deal of work. The museum’s address book, handled by the curator’s assistant, was filled with the contacts of well-known – or soon to be – artistic personalities: Marc Chagall, Kees Van Dongen, Marie Laurencin, Marcel Despiau, Germaine Richier, Pablo Picasso.¹ In that sense, the Jeu de Paume, in its role as a French window onto contemporary foreign artistic creation, was among the most active cultural institutions of the interwar period.

From December 1932 to August 1939, the succession of innovative and original exhibitions gave the personalities of André Dezarrois and Rose Valland a particularly bold and pioneering shine.² Rose Valland was a dedicated worker, as shown by the archives:³ records of letters received and dispatched, lists of works signed for, certifications for “nail to nail” insurance, etc., reveal a careful and thinking attachée de conservation, as much at ease with artists and celebrated guests as with technical staff. For her continued effort to promote foreign schools of art, seven years after her arrival at the Jeu de Paume, on 14 September 1939 she was awarded Latvia’s highest honorary distinction – the cross of the knight of Three Stars – by minister Olgerd Groswald.

Rose Valland also took part in the preparation of exhibition catalogs, a meticulous and anonymous task, but which also allowed her to increase her knowledge of the works on exhibit and acquire the habit of studying them down to the last detail. In the words of her professor at the École pratique de hautes études, Gabriel Millet, she was “the sort of person one could count on,”⁴ and responsibility for the Jeu de Paume was constantly handed over to her by André Desarrois, whose absences often stretched over long periods of holiday and travel abroad. Those years of intense volunteer activity bore the seeds of an almost emotional attachment to this new Jeu de Paume, to whose prestige Rose Valland had certainly contributed before the outbreak of the war.

Evacuation of the museums and return to the Jeu de Paume

In September 1938, Rose Valland was in charge of the implementation of passive defense measures and the evacuation orders of museums when the Anschluss, then the Sudeten crisis gave rise to fear of an imminent conflict. The Munich agreements pacified the situation, but as of 24 August 1939, the Jeu de Paume again closed its doors to the public. Evacuation resumed, and continued during the “phony war.” Rose Valland supervised the logistics and sometimes felt the need to sleep at the museum during night bombings. The 483 paintings of the museum’s permanent collection were transported to the château de Chambord, while all 112 sculptures were put in the basement. Rose Valland remained in Paris as long as possible, resigning herself to the leaving only on 13 June 1940 with the final transport reserved for the Musées nationaux staff. She arrived at the château de Valençay, where she heard the call of general de Gaulle, and returned to Paris the first few days of July.¹

Meanwhile, the German embassy was preparing the ground for the first spoliations, though it was slower than the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), which was especially targeting artworks from private Jewish collections. The massive influx of looted cultural objects led the ERR to requisition the Jeu de Paume on 1 November 1940. In agreement with Jacques Jaujard (1895-1967), director of the Musées nationaux, Rose Valland remained at her post to keep an eye on Nazi activities. The museum had become a “sorting yard” with access limited to members of the ERR; Rose Valland legitimized her presence by the need to watch over the sculptures still conserved in the basement and supervise the logistics of the building (heating, cleaning, handling).²

As the sole French scholar authorized to enter the Jeu de Paume, she became the privileged witness to Nazi spoliations, enacted by the Germans in utmost secret. Baron Kurt von Behr (1890-1945), in charge of the Rosenberg Service in Paris and Bruno Lohse (1911-2007), Göring’s front man, saw in her a threat that, on the midterm, they would have to get rid of.³ Continually suspected, followed, searched, threatened, even chased out of the museum, Rose Valland nonetheless managed to spy on ERR activities during the four years of the war.⁴ “In the end, everything I saw and heard, in my files of memory and notes, constituted a large storehouse from which I tried to figure out, as far as possible, the ERR’s operations and projects.”⁵

During this risky exercise, she could count on the complicity of the museum’s technical team, the security and packing personnel in particular. She took notes and transmitted them every two or three days through the intermediary of Jacqueline Bouchot-Saupique (1893-1975) to Jacques Jaujard, member of the Samson Resistance network.⁶

Surveillance of Jeu de Paume activities

As of March 1941, the movement of artworks intensified on the Tuileries terrace. Recently tenured and salaried, Rose Valland collected a great deal of handwritten documentation and photographs concerning the paintings, furniture, and art objects transiting through the museum. When she was able to identify them, she also noted the provenance of the collections and their destinations, as well as the identity of the Nazi high officials and the art dealers in complicity with them who came to enrich their personal collections with looted works.

On November 3 1940, Rose Valland was present at the first visit to the Jeu de Paume of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring (1893-1946), accompanied by Walter Andreas Hofer (1893-c. 1971), in charge of the latter’s personal collection.¹ In the absence of the Reichsmarschall, she had observed Bruno Lohse busy selecting works for him in accordance with his taste among those confiscated or obtained directly by exchange. Dr Hermann Bunjes (1911-1945), art historian who became director of the Institut d’art allemand in January 1942, was also one of the Reichsmarschall’s artistic intermediaries that Rose Valland frequently met in the rooms of the Jeu de Paume.² She also mentions the fact that Göring’s chargés de mission were particularly feared due to being “imbued with the power of their master.” They could be “friendly or dangerous according to which of their boss’ moods they chose for themselves.”³ She remarks that art historians and museum functionaries, like Robert Scholz (1902-1981), organizer of the Beaux-Arts section of the ERR, or lieutenant Hermann von Ingram (1903-1995), provisional director of the ERR, were less to be feared by the Jeu de Paume’s French staff. 

In her notes, Rose Valland described the mountains of works assembled in the museum following the confiscation of large private collections belonging to Jews. Thus in 1941, she described in detail the nature and quality of the Édouard, Robert, Henri, Maurice and Edmond de Rothschild collections, taken from the Parisian, suburban or provincial homes of different family members. The collections of Jacques Stern, David-Weill, Alphonse Kann, Paul Rosenberg and Alfred Lindon, among others, were added during the year.⁴ As for works considered “degenerate,” Valland documented the dealers who operated the required exchanges. Among the main actors of the twenty-eight Parisian exchanges organized with the ERR were Gustav Rochlitz, Arthur Pfannstiel, Max Stoecklin, Maria Almas-Dietrich, Adolf Wüster, Alfred Boedecker, Jan Dyk, Alexander von Frey and Isidor Rosner.⁵ Estimations of the works exchanged were supplied by the engraver Jacques Beltrand, whom she describes as a “miserable and terrorized French expert.”⁶ Moreover, Rose Valland only documented artistic exchanges and negotiations related to works in the Jeu de Paume itself, and if she knew about the activity of Parisian auction houses, in her Memoires, she doesn’t mention that either.

Artistic Recuperation in Germany

Rose Valland was still working at the Jeu de Paume when Paris was liberated on 25 August 1944. The Commission de récuperation artistique was created on 24 November of the same year, in the aim of recovering the cultural objects taken in France during the war. Rose Valland became secretary-general of the Commission, and an active member, leaving for Germany on 1 May 1945, having joined the 1st French army, where she became captain. She was among those best informed on the subject and declared: “I felt it was my duty to use this special knowledge and continue the action I was engaged in during the war.”¹

Soon before her departure, it seems that on the request of Georges Salles (1889-1966), she took part in the purge of the French art market: on 27 April, the director of the musées de France named her² to participate in the deliberations of the Commission nationale interprofessionnelle d’épuration in the affair concerning the antique dealers Albert Bourdariat (1880-1974) and Eugène Pouget, accused of serving as intermediaries for the Germans in the removal from the Bort château in Saint Priest Taurion, of two 14th c. tapestries belonging to the vicomte and vicomtesse de Sèze.³

However, most of Rose Valland’s postwar action took place in Germany, mainly in the French occupation zone, between Baden-Baden and Berlin. She contributed to maintaining the sessions devoted to artistic spoliations in France during the Nuremberg trials, when Hermann Göring and Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946) were judged, since in fact, artistic plundering

“seemed of little importance to the lawyers at the trial, compared to the other war crimes. The consequences of such thinking could be very serious in postwar legislation and on an international level, both from the viewpoint of restitutions to be obtained and compensations that could be claimed by those whose property had been looted. As soon as I saw this lacuna and the danger it represented, I explained my point of view to Monsieur [Auguste] Champetier de Ribes [1882-1947] on whom the prosecution mainly depended, insisting on the volume – as yet unknown – of artistic spoliations. After examining the issue for some time, he shared my point of view and gave orders to have the dossiers of the court completed along those lines.”⁴

Beginning in September 1945, Rose Valland became the French representative of restitutions with the 7^th American army, where she obtained the rank of lieutenant-colonel. This new status enabled her to travel more easily in the American occupation zone, where there was a concentration of ERR depots of works of art, in particular the châteaux of Füssen (Bavaria).

Rose Valland played an active part in French artistic recuperation, which took place between 1944 and 1949. Beginning in March 1946, she headed the Beaux Arts section of the French group of the Allied Control Council (Groupe français du Conseil de contrôle (GFCC) – the international authority in Berlin composed of the four allied powers acting for the German government. Two years later, she and a colleague were in charge of the Service de remise en place des œuvres d’art, SROA (Service for the return of works of art) and she became head of the central post of Artistic Recuperation in Germany and Austria. These new positions gave her authority over German museums, where collections evacuated before the war had to be reinstalled, and in the depots were sometimes mixed with looted objects.

Until March 1953 when she returned to France, Rose Valland tried to recover collections that had disappeared and to defend French interests: among her many outstanding actions can be mentioned her trips to Carinhall in Göring’s former hunting pavilion near Berlin, or the intense negotiations with officials of the Soviet zone for the return to France of part of the military trophies taken from the musée de l’Armée in Paris. In 1961, general Koenig, commander of the French forces in Germany, wrote to thank her for her action: “I can see you clearly, working with ardor – and passion, if I may say so, to discover the traces of so many beautiful things that without you, would have been lost forever."⁵

Return to France

Before her return to France, beginning on 1 March 1952, Rose Valland was named curator of national museums, although she had been on the list since 23 October 1945. The reasons for this late transformation in status were perhaps due to her detachment in Germany with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during the entire period of Artistic recuperation. In 1955, she was named head of the Service de protection des œuvres d’art (SPOA), thanks to the support of Jacques Jaujard. The aim of the service, housed in the hôtel Salomon de Rothschild at 11, rue Berryer, was to continue, under her direction, to process the claims of dispossessed families. In addition, her mission included the creation of an evacuation and sheltering plan for museum collections in the event of another world war. In that same context, she also attended, as French delegate, the 1954 Hague Convention for the protection of cultural objects in case of an armed conflict.

In 1961, Rose Valland published her memoirs, Le Front de l’art, Défense des collections françaises (1939-1945), which has become a reference for the history of the spoliations perpetrated by the ERR. One of the events related was adapted for the cinema in 1964, in “The Train,” a Hollywood superproduction directed by John Frankenheimer. Despite the celebrity she gained from the book and the film, she regretted the publicity and confided to a relative: “The jealousies and career enmities that the film made me suffer exceeded by far the satisfaction it gave me in the beginning.”¹ Even in her own administration she was the object of jealousy and tended to isolate herself to pursue her research.

Rose Valland officially retired in 1968, but continued to work until the end of her life in the archives of the Musées nationaux as a volunteer chargée de mission. She died on 18 September 1980 in Ris-Orangis, in the Paris region, without having published the second volume of her Mémoires.² She is buried in the family vault in Saint-Étienne-de-Saint-Geoirs beside Joyce Heer, her companion.