Burgoyne Diller

Burgoyne A. Diller (January 13, 1906 – January 30, 1965) was an American abstract painter. Many of his best-known works are characterized by orthogonal geometric forms that reflect his strong interest in the De Stijl movement and the work of Piet Mondrian in particular. Overall, his Geometric abstraction and non-objective style also owe much to his study with Hans Hofmann at the Art Students League of New York. He was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists. Diller's abstract work has sometimes been termed "constructivist". He also did figurative and representational works early in his career working as a muralist for the New York City Federal Arts Project.

Life Diller was born in The Bronx, New York in 1906 to Andrew Diller, a violinist and conductor, and Mary Burgoyne. His father died in 1908, while Diller was just three years old. His mother would then marry an engineer named Adrian Adney. In 1919 he and his new family moved to Battle Creek, Michigan. Diller attended Battle Creek High School and Michigan State University. He graduated from Michigan State University in 1927 and moved to Buffalo, New York, where he lived with his maternal grandfather.

In 1930 Diller married Sarah "Sally" Bernadette Conboy, who worked in the classified department of The New York Times. "Her steady income helped the couple maintain a modest lifestyle throughout the Depression."

Another major project involving Diller was the formation of the American Abstract Artists in 1937. This group was devoted to the support and propagation of abstract art in the United States. However, Diller's administrative duties to the Federal Art Project kept him from being an active member of the group and in 1940, he dropped out. He would eventually rejoin in 1947.

As an abstract artist himself, Diller was a strong proponent for the form. He felt that compared to other artists, abstract artists struggled the most to gain publicity in the American art world. Diller said "if you happened to be concerned at all about the contemporary movements in art [during his life], which then, of course, were Cubism and so on, why there was absolutely no place to show your work... we had this problem again with abstract painting. Where would you show it? You were terribly fortunate to be shown any place, which is really, you know, the thing that brought the American Abstract Artists into being, so that cooperatively they might be able to finance a place to have a show once a year and that sort of thing. It was a very necessary thing."

Critical reception During Diller's lifetime, abstract art was not very popular. Abstract artists struggled to gain any form of publicity. Diller noted "your so-called big institutions...were supposed to have done so much for the artists, you know, in the past, the Museum of Modern Art, and so on - - I don't think they had a prohibition against showing American abstract painters, but they didn't show them. They showed very, very few of them."

On the topic of Diller's own art, Kuspit said: "What saves the drawings and collages from being historical curiosities, brilliantly academic abstractions, as it were, is the heightening of the contrast between the planes and the eventual reduction of their number. This occurs under the influence not of Mondrian but of Malevich. Again and again we see Diller grandly setting up a central square adumbrated by lesser geometrical entities. The result is often reminiscent of Josef Albers's homages to the square, which in fact were contemporary with Diller's drawings and collages. One wonders who was looking over whose shoulder, or whether they were simply on the same wavelength. Diller's geometry seems more spirited and less redundant than Albers's--more Malevichean. One dark square with various agitated rectangles in it seems to recall Malevich's aerodynamic phase, and one blue square with a white-and-yellow rectangular strip above brings the final puritan, transcendental phase of Supremati to mind. If Diller is more playful than Albers, however, he's more nervous than Malevich. The nervousness shows up in the pencil lines that often appear as gestural background. Sometimes delicate, sometimes urgent, and always somber, they add a note of tentativeness to the work, which somehow saves the geometry from sterility. They give it a lively aura, suggesting that it may be secretly alive, and might even have a personality, at least latently."

Legacy "Burgoyne Diller's work testifies not only to his versatility as an artist, but also to his unique ability to personalize the international language of Neo-Plasticism and instill his simplified geometric compositions with emotion, spirituality, and a sense of the heroic.” "Diller will always be remembered as one of the most significant artists devoted to geometric abstraction, and a true pioneer of American modernism."

Philip Larson notes that "Diller's work serves as a vital link between American abstraction of the 1930s and minimalism of the 1950s and 1960s epitomized by artists Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly and Myron Stout."

After his death, he left behind a significant body of work that includes paintings, drawings, collages, and sculptures. Over the years his work has been exhibited internationally, most notably by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1990. His work is represented in numerous museum collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art.

Collections

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, DC) Hyde Collection (Glens Falls, NY) Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC) Whitney Museum of American Art (New York)

References and sources