In The Art Spy, Michelle Young details the work of French museum curator Rose Valland, who fought to protect the artistic and cultural heritage of Europe. By Valland's estimation, during World War II about one-third of personal art in France was looted by the Nazis and their collaborators. That such an accounting even exists is thanks to her eyewitness records. Valland had one directive during the Nazi occupation of France: no matter what, stay at the Jeu de Paume museum and protect the art. Before the war broke out in full, Valland championed art from countries under threat by the Nazis. But this directive turned her from a curator who fought for recognition in her career to a resistance spy.
Valland used her knowledge of art and artists as well as her meticulous observational habits and photographic memory to document the large-scale looting and theft from national collections and those seized from private citizens, particularly French Jewish families. As Young recounts, Valland's notes from her time working at the Jeu de Paume during its Nazi occupation provide a new angle on the deliberate dehumanization of Jewish people through the appropriation of their possessions, art, and homes. Her notes personalize the evils by attributing specific thefts, as well as stated antisemitism, to specific actors, some of whom tried to distance themselves later in life from what they did. Young's accounting of Valland's life, reconstructed from her documents and personal archives, shines light on a hero of the art world whose name has slipped from history, though the impact of her work for justice and restitution is still felt. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer