NYT19980604.0190 NEWS NEWSWIRE The Association of American Art Museum Directors pledged Thursday that its member museums would immediately begin a review of their collections in search of artworks that were illegally taken from their owners in the Nazi era and never returned. The action by the group, which represents the 170 largest art museums in North America, comes after several highly publicized cases of questioned ownership that raised suspicions that museums have largely ignored the possibility that they own or display tainted works. The association, here for its annual meeting, made several related promises that could change the way they do business. From now on, its members said, they will review the provenance records of works that are lent to them for exhibitions and will conduct far more scrupulous ownership research before acquiring pieces. And members agreed to respond quickly to any claims that arise, using mediation if necessary. They asked families with potential claims to make inquiries. ``I'd hope that all families with claims would come forward,'' said Philippe de Montebello, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who is chairman of a 14-member task force created in January to produce guidelines to deal with World War II art losses. ``We're inviting dialogue, a joint effort on the problem,'' said Robert Bergman, the director of the Cleveland Museum of Art and also a task force member. The association is a voluntary group without binding authority over its members, but the fact that it adopted even a vague set of guidelines on looted art was called significant by past critics. ``We want to study the recommendations carefully, but our initial reaction is that the attitude the museums are demonstrating is the beginning of the correct process,'' said Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress. ``We will encourage them to speed it up.'' If acted upon by all members, the measures could have far-reaching consequences. Museums have rarely asked questions of donors or art dealers, and if there were gaps in provenance records, even for an artwork that changed hands in Europe between 1933 and the late 1940s, these were usually not investigated. The institutions asked even fewer questions about artworks that they wanted to borrow for exhibitions. The Museum of Modern Art was caught unaware late last year when two families said that two paintings by Egon Schiele, on loan from a Viennese foundation, had been confiscated by the Nazis. The Modern is fighting a grand jury subpoena requiring it to keep the two disputed paintings in New York rather than return them to Austria until a criminal investigation is completed. On May 13, a New York state judge ruled in its favor. But the Manhattan District Attorney's office has appealed, and the paintings must stay in New York pending a ruling in the fall. In the last few years, about a half-dozen claims have been made for art taken illegally during the war years that made its way into the collections of American museums. Nothing has yet been returned, and many museum directors have frequently said that they do not think the number of future claims will be large. Still, de Montebello said Thursday, ``I don't think any museum anywhere is necessarily immune if the museum has in the last 50 years purchased any art, aside from American art.'' Simply checking the artworks that they own will be an enormous task for many museums, since most have detailed, published information on only a small part of their collections. ``We've already started looking at our collection for this,'' said James Wood, the president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago. ``But there's a new urgency and we'll feel pressure to speed it up, maybe bringing in some outside people to help.'' Noting that this work could take years, the museum directors suggested that it might require additional money but they have yet to consider how much or where it would come from. They urged the creation of more and better databases of claims, claimants, confiscated artworks and returned artworks. The association's task force was created specifically to address claims from the World War II era and did not look at other questions of provenance raised about the antiquities trade. This week the Art Loss Register, an international nonprofit organization that has until now focused on current art theft, acted to help locate art that was lost in the late 1930s and '40s: it invited people to list wartime art losses without paying its usual $20-per-item fee and contingency recovery fees. It also will start listing in its computerized database of stolen or missing art works the wartime losses identified by institutions, in news accounts and in historical documents. While the register does not adjudicate art claims, its database of more than 100,000 items is frequently checked by auction houses, insurance companies, museums and dealers before taking a consignment or making an acquisition. The register has helped recover about $75 million worth of stolen goods in the last seven years, said Ronald Tauber, its chairman for the United States.