PUBLIC FAVORITES (4 & 5)

The City Art Museum of St. Louis and San Francisco's M. H. de Young Memorial Museum have two things in common: both are tax-supported to the tune of $300,000 a year, and the public's favorite painting at both museums is a religious figure. One painting is as still as death; the other crackles with fiery life. Some 500,000 St. Louisans visit their museum annually, and their particular pride & joy is Francisco de Zurbaran's Monk with a Skull, which cost only $3,000 in 1941. The pink-stuccoed De Young Museum, in beautiful Golden Gate Park, draws a million people a year; their favorite, judging by reproduction sales, is El Greco's stormy St. John the Baptist.

Zurbaran was best at such stone-cold, stone-solid figure pieces as the Monk. A somber ascetic, the 17th Century Spaniard never strayed from his native land or from his passionately simple, sculptural style. Like Velasquez, he was a realist who painted only from models, but while Velasquez was concerned chiefly with color, Zurbaran cared only for form.

El Greco found realism a bore, and scorned the restraint that made Zurbaran a minor master. To be great, he needed neither. The shapes El Greco painted were generally shaky and his colors were often curious. More concerned with spirit than with matter, he merged the two in pictures as moving as any ever painted.

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