By Fox Butterfield, Special To the New York Times/ The New York Times Archives

March 12, 1986

Imelda Marcos routinely took large numbers of paintings from a major museum here to display in her houses around the Philippines, a team of Government inspectors found today.

”She’d come and pick things up whenever she wanted, even in the middle of the night,” said Arturo Luz, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Manila. ”There was no accounting, no questions asked.”

Mrs. Marcos fled to Hawaii two weeks ago with her husband, Ferdinand E. Marcos.

”Her favorite items,” Mr. Luz said, were a collection of Russian icons – he thinks they are now in Mrs. Marcos’s resort home on the island of Leyte in the central Philippines, he said – and a group of 200 so-called Naif paintings by Yugoslav farmers. Only 44 of these are left in the museum, many of the others were taken to Malacanang Palace and several nearby guest houses by Mrs. Marcos, Mr. Luz said. Museum Is ‘Sequestered’

Mr. Luz also said he found himself in the odd position of having to explain to the team of civilian and military officials how the museum acquired the holdings in the first place.

The officials ”sequestered” the museum today in the name of the new Government of Corazon C. Aquino.

”Officially we were told that some of the art, like the Russian icons and the Naifs were bought by the First Lady, who just dumped them on us,” said Mr. Luz, a prominent Filipino painter.

The provenance of the museum’s most valuable collection, 75 paintings by Italian Renaissance masters, was even more obscure, Mr. Luz said. Mrs. Marcos asserted that a few of the pieces were her own, and they were marked with an asterisk in the museum’s files. But the bulk arrived in 1977, a year after the museum opened, supposedly ”an anonymous loan from an Italian collector,” Mr. Luz reported. ‘Never Given Any Paperwork’

”I pressed and pressed to find out where they came from, but we were never given any paperwork and the First Lady told me to stop asking,” he said. The collection of Italian masters, valued by Mr. Luz at $10 million, include paintings by Botticelli, Raphael, Titian and Tintoretto.

As to who owns them now, Alejandro Roces, the leader of the Government team, was pointed. ”They are the patrimony of the Filipino people,” he told Mr. Luz and the staff members of the museum, who gathered in an auditorium to hear what the Aquino administration intends to do with the art.

”Let her try to claim that they are hers,” said Mr. Roces, a former Minister of Education and longtime critic of the Marcoses. ”What did the President earn, $4,000 a year? How could they legally afford to buy all these things?”

”These paintings show the Marcoses lost track of all distinction between public and private, between what was theirs and what belonged to the country,” said Mr. Roces.

His arrival at the pillbox-shaped gray concrete museum facing Manila Bay was delayed for several hours because Maj. Alfredo Ripoll, the head of the military component of the team, wanted to watch the boxing match in Las Vegas between Marvin Hagler and John (The Beast) Mugabi, which was televised live here.

When Mr. Roces finally charged up the steps, in what Filipinos have come to call a raid, he demanded that museum personnel take him ”to the secret basement,” where he believed Mrs. Marcos had stored some art works.

There was no hidden room, to Mr. Roces’s disappointment, only a meager library of art books, a few old posters and a collection of pornographic movies in large reels that Mr. Luz said belonged to Imee Marcos Manotoc, the President’s oldest daughter. She had been placed in charge of cultural affairs in the last few years. ‘I’d Like to Take It Home’

Mrs. Manotoc, who fled with her parents to Hawaii, also borrowed paintings, Mr. Luz said. ”She’d say, that is a nice painting, I’d like to take it home. Then you’d see it on her wall. Later you’d go back and it would be gone. Who knows where it went.” Mr. Roces and Major Ripoll, who was dressed in camouflage fatigues, both expressed concern that they locate the missing paintings in the Marcoses’ other homes as quickly as possible because of a growing problem of raids by illegal groups posing as members of the Government commission charged with recovering the Marcoses’ secret wealth. Mr. Roces said ”a classic case” was a raid on Mrs. Manotoc’s home last week by some unidentified soldiers, who he said may have taken away some paintings.

To make a computerized inventory of the museum’s holdings, Mr. Roces has assembled a group of half a dozen well-known figures in the art world here.

When one of the group asked today what had happened to the museum’s endowment of $595,000, Mr. Luz said that about half of it had been lent at a low-interest rate to Eagle Mines, a bankrupt enterprise owned by Bienvenido Tantoco, the chairman of the museum’s board of directors and a close friend of Mrs. Marcos.

Mr. Roces said he planned to start inspecting other museums in Manila on Wednesday to see what was missing, and would have the air force fly him to Leyte to retrieve the Russian icons in Mrs. Marcos’s residence there.

As for the Yugoslav Naif paintings of which Mrs. Marcos was so fond, he suggested they had little value as art. ”If we could get a good price, we will sell them,” he said. ”We can use the money to pay our foreign debt, or for agriculture, or to build homes for people.”