Number Seventy-Seven

From New York Times review of Hiding Man:

As a writer, Barthelme was deeply alert to what was happening in the visual arts, reading the criticism of, say, Harold Rosenberg with the same enthusiasm he brought to Beckett's work as it began to appear in English. Painters like de Kooning seemed to enter his spirit as much as any authors he read; there is a sense in his work, as in that of certain painters, that the human form or presence is worth treating as merely an exiting aspect of line and gesture, tone and texture.