LONDON -- Museums in Britain are nervously awaiting the results of the Internet publication of an official inventory of 350 works of art in British national collections whose provenance in the period between 1933 and 1945 is unclear. More than half belong to the National Gallery and the Tate, 109 and 80 paintings respectively. Although the directors of both institutions stressed that nothing had been positively identified as property stolen during the Nazi period, there is a distinct air of nervousness in their public statements and of the other gallery directors involved.

The government has made no commitment to return any suspect works or pay compensation, and the galleries themselves are legally barred from disposing of their collections. The return of artworks proven to have been stolen would require an act of Parliament and a huge reparations bill. A very sticky situation indeed since the works are not by minor artists but from the premier league.

The only collections that have nothing to fear are closed 19th-century private ones such as the Wallace Collection and that of Sir John Soane's Museum to which nothing has been added since their founder's demise.

Sir John Soane, who died in 1837, the year of Queen Victoria's coronation, was the pre- eminent architect of his generation, responsible for the Bank of England and many London landmarks. Unlike many architects of the period, his influence has endured; the list of admirers who cite his influence on their own work includes names as diverse as Frank Gehry, Richard Meier and Arata Isozaki, who wrote a book about him. Meier's 1991 J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles was directly inspired by Soane's Dulwich Picture Gallery, where skylights and other innovative features made it the first truly custom-built picture gallery in the world.

Soane was born in Berkshire in 1753, the youngest child of a bricklayer and rose to become Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy. He started the museum in his own home and drawing office, opening his collection of books, sculpture, paintings and archaeological finds to the public (except in "wet or dirty weather") so that they could be inspired as he himself had been. He was convinced that the study of classical principles of design should be the foundation of a student's education.

The collection is vast, with 3,000 sculptures, 10,000 books, 30,000 drawings and numerous other objects, from Egyptian sarcophagi to Roman funerary urns, crammed into three town houses which he bought and rebuilt to form a symmetrical composition facing Lincoln's Inn Fields in London's legal heartland. As one of the attendants told me, "It's all cataloged, but you need a wheelbarrow to bring it down."

When he left the museum to the nation, his only stipulation was that it be left "as nearly as possible in the state in which he shall leave it." And his wishes have been respected. In 1995 a five-year restoration program was completed and the rooms now appear almost exactly as they did on the day of Soane's death, except for the stained glass windows, which were blown out during World War II.

Unlike many museums where dust and time hang heavy on their unvisited collections, Sir John Soane's Museum has always attracted an enthusiastic and varied public, some 90,000 visitors per year. It is a very small museum, with all the appeal of Ali Baba's cave, not only in its architectural detailing (Soane tried out many of his ideas inside), but because of the sheer variety and volume of what is on display.

The basement crypt, for example, was planned to have an atmosphere reminiscent of Roman burial chambers, and its centerpiece is the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Seti I, one of the most important Egyptian antiquities ever to be discovered. Next door is the Monk's Parlor, a similarly lugubrious room in Gothic style, where Soane used atmospheric effects of light and space and large chunks of 13th-century masonry and timberwork he removed from the Palace of Westminster while doing alterations there. Outside in the yard is buried Mrs. Soane's dog, while in a tall cabinet inside is the skeleton of Soane's friend, the sculptor Flaxman, whose widow presented it to Soane after his death and then invoiced the museum for the costs. She was never paid but a visiting surgeon noticed recently that while the figure is male, the pelvis is female.

The skeleton set the filmmaker Tom Gidley thinking, and he has produced a short six-minute film called "Soane's Bones" that plays on this mystery. It is now showing at the museum as part of an exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, in which 24 artists were invited to respond to the museum's collection. From Gilbert and George to Richard Hamilton to Rem Koolhaas to Anish Kapoor, all have tried to assert their vision. Most have failed.

In part this is because the competition is too great and the limitations manifold -- there is just not enough space, and large works were out of the question. Most of the artists have contented themselves with inserting yet more objects, often too subtle even to be noticed.

I could not work out, for example, whether a label on one of the few blank spaces on the wall indicating that a stone bracket had been removed for conservation was one of them or not. The label was typewritten on yellowing card of the kind used in museums everywhere before the combined forces of accountability and the needs of the leisure industry hit them. Was this a memory of times past, a conceptual work or just a label?

Kapoor's work is noticeable only because it makes a noise. He has set a vortex with dark yellow liquid spinning around an aluminum disc under a skylight shaped like the roof of a Chinese pagoda. In the basement another, dark red, one has been placed next to a skull -- a very literal, very impoverished vision. Gilbert and George have merely photographed themselves sitting in the library as if waiting for the real queen to visit.

Apart from Gidley's film, only Richard Wentworth, whose work is bound up in the chance encounters of objects and people, has produced one that is totally in keeping with the spirit of the collection and the place. His work is a subtle reminder of the real relationship between objects and individual mortality and of how their strange juxtapositions in the museum have a poetry all of their own. On a table lies a cup of coffee and an open newspaper dated Jan. 18, 1995, the day on which the Kobe earthquake was reported in the British press. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.