#rosevalland — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #rosevalland, aggregated by home.social.
-
#art #Nazis #antifa #RoseValland #LGBTQI #WWII #history
"Learning the History of 'The Art Spy' Rose Valland
(. . .)
Several times during the German occupation of France — which lasted May 1940 to December 1944 — Nazi officers denied Rose Valland continued access to the Jeu de Paume museum where she worked. The museum served as a storage and viewing space for certain art dealers and noted art thief Hermann Göring, 'but she talked her way back in every time, explaining calmly that she was just a lowly employee of the French national museums who oversaw the building’s maintenance and the remaining art collection,' Young writes. 'In reality, she was one of the most well-educated art historians in France.'
(. . .)
'By nightfall, the Louvre was nearly empty' — 95 trucks had whisked away more than 1200 crates, thousands of paintings, and tens of thousands of sculptures.
In addition, the country’s art-collecting families — most notably the Rothschilds — entrusted their carefully curated art into the hands of national museums as well. Artist Fernand Léger, for example, deposited 69 paintings. By November 1939, 5,000 crates of art had left Paris from national museums. 'The Mona Lisa was strapped onto a gurney and covertly moved in a hermetically sealed, airtight truck' for a roughly 100-mile trip, eventually spending 'the winter hibernating inside an armoire.'
But eventually, the threat of bombing attacks were not the only thing for which they had to create extensive plans of protection.
(. . .)
Despite Valland’s value to museum management for years — as well as risking her life many times, and walking hundreds of miles after a boat logjam out of Paris to find other transportation for museum staff and art during one exodus — Valland largely worked as an unpaid volunteer, partly because of a particularly sexist museum director.
She was able to secretly keep track of what the Germans were doing. As the book lays out, in limited detail, she also had what would be a private 50-year relationship with her partner Joyce, a British citizen, who was employed at the U.S. embassy in Paris, where she was valuable for fluency in German, French, and English. Though it would have been safer for her to leave Paris, especially after the occupation, she chose to stay — likely because of Rose. Eventually Joyce was arrested and sent to a German camp with atrocious conditions — holes in the ceilings that let in freezing air, lice and rats, rotted vegetables, a hole in the floors as toilet for dozens of women crammed into small rooms.
Several months later embassy officials discovered she had been swept up in a purge of English citizens and arranged for her release as a valuable German-speaking employee."
(. . .)"
https://www.womenspress.com/learning-the-history-of-the-art-spy-rose-villand/
-
Guten Morgen ihr Lieben,
Nach der Sommerpause ist seit Samstag eine neue Folge von „#Museum am Sofa“, online. Diesmal geht es um #Restitution (nicht nur in Salzburg).
Mit max. 10 Minuten Dauer passt der #Podcast übrigens immer gut für zwischendurch.https://www.salzburgmuseum.at/kunst-und-kulturvermittlung/museum-digital/podcast/
#museumsgeschichten #kulturvermittlung #RoseValland #NSRaubkunst #salzburg #salzburgmuseum
