Michelle Young, The Art Spy

Is this a crucial story, the one told in Michelle Young's nonfiction The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland? Absolutely, and I'm very glad that she has told it.

Is this book a good read? Well.... 

Listen: I know I'm in a men's book club, most of us at the point where we're losing our grip on the later stages of middle age, and yet WW2 history just isn't something I read. Europe in the 1930s and 1940s isn't a period or a subject where I want to spend my time and energy. (Everybody else is doing the reading for me, you know? You can't read everything.) I've got a very clear sense of the atrocities, the pre-war social changes, the large-scale political machinations, that sort of thing, but it's like American history for me, in that I'd rather know only enough that I can assess and understand it correctly.

This makes me something of a reluctant reader for Michelle Young's The Art Spy, which is the Beer & Books club's current selection. On the other hand, committed readers aren't always the most careful or the most readerly. When I did a DuckDuckGo search ("asked the duck" is my new "googled it"), one of the highest-surfacing reviews that seemed un-AI was by John Rosove for the Times of Israel, for example; Rosove is "past National Chairman of the Association of Reform Zionists of America" (per his own website), so he's very much the right reader for this book. Among other things, he remarks in his review that Rose Valland's partner was imprisoned "for about six months," but in fact her imprisonment lasted from December 5, 1940, to February 13, 1941 (p173, p186). This small error is almost irrelevant, obviously, but if he gets the details wrong, what's his reading process? Does it mean that his reading of a book like this one is different from my own? Of course no two people read the same way, but I'd say that his attitude or approach is fundamentally different from mine when it comes to reading a book like this as reading, if you see what I mean. That's not because of faith or politics directly, but because he's reading with different context and for different elements, which fundamentally is how it works for humans and our brains.

So let me say this.

Michelle Young's The Art Spy is a valuable contribution to the history of the second world war, to art history, and to the history of both France and Germany. Rose Valland's story is crucially important in all these areas, and she's someone whose efforts during and after WW2 need to be widely recognized. In that sense, The Art Spy is a really useful (re?)popularization and illumination of a particular element of WW2 history.

Specifically, during the war, Rose Valland documented minutely and constantly the process and extent of looting within the European art world, and in doing so, she laid the groundwork for the subsequent decades of investigation, restitution, and reclamation. Without her work, we would have had no ability to pierce the disruptions in provenance and "ownership" of hundreds of thousands of artworks: pieces by Old Masters, certainly, but also huge swathes of the twentieth-century art that Hitler referred to as "degenerate." In this book, Young does a very good job of articulating the interlocking mechanisms between art looting, war profiteering, and genocide, all of which adds up to one simple fact: the petty tyranny of small men was the engine that murdered millions of Jews.

This is all made more intriguing by the facts of Rose Valland's life, one of which is that she had a lifelong lesbian relationship with Joyce Heer, and another is that she spent most of the 1930s working unpaid in the French museum system because of its structural misogyny (but more particularly, the focused and individualized misogyny of Henri Verne, director of the Musées Nationaux). In 2026, too, it's all paralleled by the fascism and looting, much of it AI-supported, occurring within the orbit of the American presidency, which makes it an even more pressing subject.

Is this a great read, though, for someone who doesn't spend much time on the details of WW2 history? Reluctantly, I don't think so. It's fine, and its committed readers should find it very compelling indeed, but for me, any excitement in reading this book was owing to Rose Valland, not to the book's telling of her story.

But as I say, I'm not this book's target market, and I'm not this author's intended reader. Maybe it'll be exactly what you need, though, and if so, I'll be glad for you.