Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, July 12, 2025 : Burgoyne Diller, an American painter (#2329)

Saturday, July 12, 2025

Artist of the Day, July 12, 2025 : Burgoyne Diller, an American painter (#2329)

Born in New York City, Burgoyne Diller (1906 - 1965) was brought up in Michigan. He returned to New York in 1926 and studied at the Art Students League from 1928 to 1932. With Hans Hofmann, Diller made his first geometrical paintings in the 1930s, embracing the rigid formulas of Piet Mondrian's "pure plastic art," which included the use of horizontal and vertical lines as well as primary colors. Diller became director of the Mural Division of the New York City Works Progress Administration, Federal Art Project in 1935, and remained in government service until 1941. In 1945, he became associate professor of art at Brooklyn College. Burgoyne Diller died in 1965.

Influenced by the works of Piet Mondrian from the 1910s and 1920s, Diller devised his own abstract formats in the 1930s. Divided into groups called "first," "second," and "third" themes, Diller’s three series explore the movement generated by different arrangements of geometric forms within a square canvas. "Second" theme pictures, such as this, feature a grid system within which rectangular bands of differing widths extend across the canvas.

In the mid-1930s, Burgoyne Diller was one of the first American artists to adopt the strict grammar and limited vocabulary of Neo-Plasticism, also known as De Stijl. This systematic approach to painting, advocated by the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, replaced the curves of nature with a man-made geometric order: only right angles and straight lines were permitted; the palette was restricted to primary colors, plus black and white; and any illusion of depth was to be avoided. Like the Neoplastic artists, Diller was primarily concerned with achieving a sense of formal balance, stability, and structure through the use of horizontal and vertical lines and primary colors. He believed that the geometric calculations of his canvases were well suited to a modern, industrialized world, offering an experience free of unnecessary and antiquated embellishments. At the end of his life, in the 1960s, Diller retrospectively categorized his work from the previous decades into three numbered groups: the First Theme includes rectangles arranged without a grid structure; in the Second Theme paintings, the rectangles cross to form single grids; in the Third Theme, including this painting, the forms are organized in an elaborate grid structure.
© 2025. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Burgoyne Diller or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only