Michelle Young

Michelle Young discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Michelle Young, a journalist and professor of architecture at Columbia University, spent four years researching The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland, which is available at https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-art-spy-michelle-young?variant=43046200836130. A veritable female Monuments Man, Valland has, until now, mostly been written out of the annals, despite bearing witness to history’s largest art theft. While Hitler was amassing stolen art for his future Führermuseum, Valland secretly worked to stop him.

Michelle Young is an award-winning journalist, author, and professor whose writing on looted and lost art has appeared in Hyperallergic, The Forward, and The Wilson Quarterly. She is a graduate of Harvard College in the History of Art and Architecture and holds a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she is a professor of architecture.

1. Rose Valland was one of the most medalled women from all of WWII

2. Hollywood optioned Rose's memoir and it became the Burt Lancaster caper The Train

3. Rose witnessed the Nazis burn approx 500 modern paintings of art and it really happened

1. Rose was lesbian and started living with Joyce Heer, her life partner, starting in the mid 1930s. 

2. Rose was spying in the field, as well as in the museum. She also worked directly with Resistance operatives, which is how she directly helped sabotage the last train of art intended to leave France, carrying 1000 paintings. 

3. One of the very first things the Nazis did when they occupied a country was to loot its art, in particular from Jewish families. There is a direct line between art looting and the extermination camps

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