Category: antiquarian books

A pioneer of American modernism, Burgoyne Diller devoted his career to the exploration of geometric abstraction in paintings, drawings, collages, and sculptures.

For Diller, abstraction was the ideal realm of harmony, stability and order in which every form and spatial interval could be controlled and measured. His style began with forms of modernism, including cubism, Kandinsky’s abstraction, constructivism, and other European models.He simplified his palette to the bold colors and black and white of neoplasticism and reduced his visual vocabulary to squares and rectangles.” “Diller developed a highly personal language based on three major compositional themes. These themes, which he labeled “First,” “Second,” and “Third,” explored the picture plane in relation to forms in movement and forms in constant opposition. By 1934 Diller had likely become the earliest American exponent of Mondrian’s type of geometrical abstraction. In the early 1940s, he began creating wall-mounted wood constructions, and during the 1950s and 1960s his sculptures developed into the large-scale, free-standing, formica works for which he is well known.”

The Sullivan Goss Art Gallery notes the following about Diller’s style: “Composed predominantly of squares and rectangles and accented with primary colors against a solid white background, Diller’s mature abstract paintings are the result of his explorations of pure color and form. Diller’s austere work recalls the stinging isolation of the lives of all Americans of the Depression era, and possibly his own. However, the well-planned geometric nature of his paintings reveals his desire for a reconstructed world prevailing over the seemingly hopeless situation in the United States during the Depression

Above is the excellent text on Diller and his style of painting found on Wikipedia

http://www.ftn-books.com has some excellent and scarce Diller publications available