By STEVEN LEE MYERS

BAGHDAD ? What’s left of Saddam Hussein’s showcase collection of 20th-century Iraqi art is crammed into three dingy galleries of a formerly grand museum here. The rest of the building once known as the Center for Contemporary Art is closed to the public. Hundreds of works are packed away .

Many are damaged. All are withering from dangerous conditions and haphazard storage, from the heat and Iraq’s official indifference to an important if lesser-known part of its artistic heritage. Iraq’s modern art collection, renamed the National Museum of Modern Art in 2006 , exists mostly as an idea.

That it exists at all is owed largely to the efforts of a group of officials, curators and artists who have struggled through years of war to rebuild a record of an artistic awakening that produced a century’s worth of painting and sculpture in modernist styles, borrowed from international movements but filtered through Iraqi and Arabic sensibilities.

“This is not only part of our history,” said Taha Wahaib, a sculptor who joined an unofficial “people’s committee of artists” dedicated to restoring the museum’s collection after the calamitous events of April 2003.

“This is part of humanity.” The museum, like Iraq’s far more famous National Museum, was looted and its building ransacked after Mr. Hussein’s regime collapsed. But unlike the National Museum, it has received scant attention from the country’s struggling new government and from international donors. Mr. Wahaib tears up when he recalls what happened. “When you see your culture, your history, devastated in this manner ? whether it’s intentional or not ...” he said, stopping, his voice cracking. “What we saw , it was heartbreaking.”

Seven years after war engulfed Iraq, Iraq’s legacy of modern art remains largely forgotten. Of the museum’s 8,000 paintings and sculptures, some 7,000 were looted in three chaotic days. In the months that followed, the museum’s artwork began appearing on the streets, up for sale by Iraqis desperate for cash. “They had no idea what they took,” Hassan Qusay, a museum manager, said.

Nor did they know the value of the works. The people’s committee of artists began buying what it could. Mr. Wahaib paid the equivalent of $100 for a wooden statue by Jawad Salim, one of Iraq’s most prominent modernists, who died in 1961. It is called “Motherhood,” a stylized figure holding a heart above her head, only the heart is now missing.

The artists have over the years managed to find and collect more than 400 works. Qasim Sabti, an artist and, as owner of the Hewar Gallery, a patron, paid $8,650 to collect 34 looted paintings and 2 sculptures. The Ministry of Culture has declined to provide money to purchase more.

“We lost our country,” he said. “We’ve lost our culture.” In early July the police found 12 paintings in an apartment near the museum . Many more works have been smuggled out of the country and sold, sometimes openly. The director of Iraq’s Interpol office, Salahudin al-Tahi, noted that records of the museum’s inventory were destroyed during the looting, complicating efforts to identify works abroad. “These pieces aren’t stamped,” he said. (In fact, many are, with an M and an S, for markaz Saddam, or Saddam Center.) “They are undated. There’s no name of the artist, no title, when it entered the collection. It’s very, very difficult for us.”

Understandably perhaps, the restoration of an art museum might rank low as a priority, given Iraq’s myriad problems, but the museum’s director, Salam Atta Sabri, 57, said that without an appreciation of arts and culture, the country will never be whole. Mr. Sabri, an artist and the son of an artist, became the museum’s director in 2009 . One of his father’s paintings had been found, badly damaged. “I feel sad ? not only as an artist,” he said. “ This belongs to our history. This belongs to our people. My heart is bleeding.”