August 25, 1989

LEAD: EVERY summer, while their owners spend a few months in the South of France or some similar locale, paintings by artists like Canaletto, Gauguin and Rembrandt take up residence on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These seasonal guests are distinguishable from works in the permanent collection only by labels that describe them in small print as belonging to an anonymous collector, although it is impossible for the casual observer to know which of the paintings are on long-term loan and which are just passing through.

LEAD: The Government is investigating whether some mutual fund managers who bought slow-selling securities for their funds from Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc. received what might have amounted to kickbacks - warrants for their own accounts - people close to the inquiry said yesterday.

LEAD: The Holiday Corporation said yesterday that it had agreed to sell its Holiday Inn hotel chain to Bass P.L.C., a British brewer with interests in the restaurant and lodging industries. Bass will pay Holiday's shareholders $125 million in Bass stock and assume about $2.1 billion of debt.

LEAD: Frank Lorenzo, the chairman of the Texas Air Corporation, said yesterday that the company was considering the sale of a controlling or a minority interest in Continental Airlines and had already talked with parties interested in buying it. Airline analysts interpreted the move as an effort to raise cash and bolster the stock price of Texas

LEAD: Although the Dow Jones industrial average reached a high yesterday, Wall Street remains a far more subdued place than it was at the 1987 peak. Enthusiasm for stocks is far less, brokerage house profits are down, and many of the thousands of people laid off by Wall Street have not returned to the industry.