AN OBSTINATE SURVIVOR.(Goya)(Book Review)

Spain may have lost her American empire, but dead Spanish painters lately rule the hemisphere of art: Picasso going mano a mano with Matisse at moma Queens; Velazquez and Zurbaran up at the Met this spring, soberly showing Manet the way to modernity; this fall at the Met, the heaven-oriented El Greco megashow; and now a thick, lovingly produced book, "Goya," by Robert Hughes (Knopf; $40). Hughes, a native Australian who moved to the United States in 1970 and was, until 2001, the chief art critic for Time, has been a robust, even rambunctious writer, unabashedly opinionated and flamboyantly metaphorical and aphoristic: I have seen his prose characterized as of the Muscle ...