Southwest Museum Reports More Losses : Art: Total of missing American Indian works now at 109, with a value of more than $2 million.

Officials of the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles have discovered that an additional 44 American Indian artworks are missing from the collection, bringing the total value of unaccounted-for items to more than $2 million.

Included among the new group of missing masks, paintings, baskets, carvings, jewelry and textiles are a valuable Thomas Moran painting and a sacred Zuni wood carving. The updated list totals 109 missing items, of which eight have been recovered by the FBI, museum Executive Director Jerome Selmer said.

A shortfall in the collection was originally discovered about nine months ago during an inventory. Although museum officials have refused to call it theft and will not discuss how the items left the Mt. Washington museum, the FBI has been investigating since the inventory was taken. In addition to the eight objects found, the FBI has leads on the whereabouts of 16 others, Selmer said.

“We get the feeling that things are picking up in the investigation, that more pieces will be recovered soon,” Selmer said. “But we are not working under the illusion that we are going to get every piece back.”

Selmer said the museum collection is insured, but officials have not filed claims on the missing items in hopes that more will be recovered.

Some of the works have been openly traded on the art market. One of the pieces listed as missing, a large Maynard Dixon painting titled “Ieska Wakan,” appeared on the cover of the November, 1984, issue of Western’s World, the in-flight magazine of Western Airlines, which has since merged with Delta Air Lines.

The magazine credited Fenn Galleries of Santa Fe, N.M., with giving it permission to reproduce the painting. Gallery director Harry McKee did not return numerous telephone calls by The Times.

Another Dixon painting missing from the museum showed up in an advertisement in the June, 1988, issue of Antiques & Fine Art magazine.

“We had no idea at the time that the museum was saying it owned it,” said John Broschofsky, owner of Broschofsky Galleries of Ketcham, Idaho, who placed the ad for the 1919 painting, “Washoe Wickiup.” “We had bought it from a local collector who said he bought it from someone in Scottsdale. We sold it to another private collector.”

Broschofsky would not disclose the names of the collectors involved. He did say he sold the painting for a figure “in the high teens.” He said he had not been contacted about it by the FBI.

Descriptions of the new items on the list will be distributed nationwide next week by the International Foundation for Art Research.

Officials said they will continue their inventory of the museum’s 200,000 objects, but they did not expect to identify many more missing artworks.

Two of the items on the list to be released next week are of particular interest to the art and American Indian worlds.

A carving of a Zuni Indian war god on the new list is sacred to the Zuni tribe, which is trying to take such works off the art market and reclaim them, according to Jonathan Batkin, curator of anthropology at the Southwest Museum.

Several museums, including the Southwest, have returned similar items to the Zuni tribe in recent years.

“These were made to be put in a shrine maintained by Zuni priests,” Batkin said. “It’s not the kind of object that should be out there on the open market.”

Batkin said that two similar carvings found during the museum inventory had been returned to the Zunis.

The Moran oil painting is an untitled landscape dated 1922 and inscribed, “To my good friend C. F. Lummis.” Historian and newspaper editor Charles Lummis founded the Southwest Museum in 1907.

Moran, a British-born artist best known for his large-scale landscape works, is in the critics’ pantheon of painters of Western scenes. “He is one of the premier masters,” said Edwin Wade, director of the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa, Okla., which has several Moran paintings. “His large works can easily command $2 million.”

The Moran missing from the Southwest Museum is relatively small, but oil paintings by him have usually sold for at least $100,000 at auction in recent years.

Museum officials say they do not have a photograph of the Moran painting but have records that prove it belongs to the museum.

At least one object on the original list does not actually belong to the museum. A rare Hopi Indian pot on the list was discovered to be in the collection of the Arizona State Museum in Tucson. The Arizona museum was able to show that it was the rightful owner.

“That was a situation where we had found a record on the object as being, at one time, in the Southwest Museum, but we were not sure on what basis it was there or what happened to it,” Batkin said. As it turned out, the pot had been loaned to the Southwest Museum in 1919 for a special exhibit.

Selmer said the FBI had requested that the Hopi pot and four other items whose ownership was questionable be listed as missing from the Southwest Museum. Records showed that at one time they had been housed there, but museum officials could not prove ownership of them.

“I’d say that we are very confident that all these other items on the list belong to the museum,” Selmer said.