ART: SAVING THE SPOILS OF WAR

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Daniel Searle, heir to a $1.5 billion fortune, has largely devoted himself to charity since stepping down 20 years ago as head of his family's pharmaceutical company. And no institution has received more of his attention than the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1987, at the museum's behest and with the assistance of two of its curators, Searle purchased a Degas pastel known as Landscape with Smokestacks for $850,000. Now, 10 years later, the 71-year-old philanthropist faces a major lawsuit filed by the heirs of Holocaust victims who claim that the painting was stolen from their relatives by the Nazis. "My family was murdered, their possessions destroyed or stolen," says Simon Goodman, a Los Angeles businessman who, together with his brother and aunt, is suing Searle. "These works are all that is left of our heritage, so we want the painting back." The two sides are holding talks that, if not successful, will set the stage for what is likely to be an acrimonious trial early next year.

Unlike the millions of victims who perished in the Holocaust, the possessions they were forced to leave behind often survived the war. The search for lost gold and cash has recently focused on Swiss banks, but the quest for their art is broader, spreading throughout Europe and into the U.S. Experts estimate that there are scores, perhaps hundreds, of paintings, prints and lithographs stolen by the Nazis that are now in America's private collections and top museums. New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art owns two allegedly looted paintings, one claimed by the Belgian government, the other by an anonymous German owner. Last month the Boston Globe published a lengthy investigation that raised questions about paintings by Degas, Picasso, Cezanne and other masters that now hang in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and in the Fogg Museum of Harvard University. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum as well as Sotheby's and Christie's all possess or, in the case of the auction houses, have recently sold works that may have been confiscated. Even the National Gallery in Washington has just been criticized by B'nai B'rith for a 1990 Impressionist show that contained four allegedly looted paintings, although the museum's catalog never identified the works as such.

These elite institutions minimize their role, saying they are shocked by the controversy and only want to discover the truth. "Buyers, especially major museums, have a moral responsibility to return anything taken by the Nazis," argues Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan. "Art dealing is a multibillion-dollar, unregulated global business where some people are more concerned with selecting the right frame than with where a picture comes from."

The Nazis' plunder of art was carried out on the express instructions of Adolf Hitler, a failed art student and amateur watercolorist before he turned to mass murder. Fond of Old Masters, Hitler dreamed of building a huge stock of cultural masterpieces in the Reich. Hermann Goring, head of the Luftwaffe and later Hitler's right-hand man, eventually assembled one of the largest private art collections in Europe. Many of those works were confiscated from Jews.