Burgoyne Diller and Hard-Edge Abstraction: Underpinnings and Continuity

November 8, 2007 - January 5, 2008

PRESS RELEASE

Spanierman Modern is pleased to announce the opening on November 8, 2007 of Burgoyne Diller and Hard-Edge Abstraction: Underpinnings and Continuity, an exhibition and sale that addresses Diller’s role in the development and continuation of geometric abstraction in America by drawing parallels between his art and that of the painters who became known as Hard-Edge and Minimalist in the 1960s. Along with examples by Diller, the exhibition includes art by Karl Benjamin, Ilya Bolotowsky, Lorser Feitelson, Alexander Lieberman, Helen Lundeberg, Howard Mehring, Leon Polk Smith, and Angelo Testa.

Burgoyne Diller, Untitled (First Theme), 1962
Oil on canvas, 78 x 60 inches

Burgoyne Diller (1906-1965), who was born in New York City and grew up in Battle Creek, Michigan, returned to Manhattan in 1929. Enrolling at the Art Students League, he studied first with Jan Matulka and with then with Hans Hofmann, both of whom served as important mentors to him, encouraging his exploration of issues of pure form and color. By the early 1930s, he had become a leading figure in the community of New York’s abstract art community. He began associating with Katherine Dreier, the founder of the Société Anonyme and meeting such artists as Arshile Gorky, John Graham, Stuart Davis, and Josef Albers. By the middle of the decade, Diller began to find a personal resonance with the art of the Russian Constructivists and the artists associated with the De Stijl movement, including primarily Piet Mondrian and Theo Van Doesburg. Diller established a vocabulary similar to Mondrian’s and concurred with the universalist themes in the Dutch painter’s art, although his work also reflected his desire for a new restructured world order in response to the seeming hopelessness of the lives of Americans during the Depression.

Burgoyne Diller played an influential part in the development of abstract painting in America in the 1930s. As head of the mural division for the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project from 1934 to 1938, he promoted abstraction as a unifying language of optimism and equality. His participation in the exhibitions of the American Abstract Artists (established 1936) from 1937 through 1939 enabled him to befriend such leading abstract painters as Albers, Ilya Bolotowsky, George L. K. Morris, Werner Drewes, Alice Mason, and Albert E. Gallatin.

The art of Mondrian continued to influence Burgoyne Diller, after the Dutch artist settled in New York in 1940. Following Mondrian, in the 1940s, Diller created works in his “Third Theme” that reflect the dynamism of Mondrian’s New York-inspired paintings of the time. In the latter half of the 1940s, Mondrian’s art fell out of favor in the face of the tragedy of the war, as the Dutch painter’s emphasis on a dispassionate, egalitarianism seemed to deny a “human” art of feeling and respect for the individual. Seen as allied with Mondrian, Diller was ostracized by the art world of the day, and his production declined. He began to work again in 1959, and when Galerie Chalette, New York, opened a large Diller exhibition in 1961, his art was hailed as resonating with that of the new Minimalists of the time. His flat surfaces, severely limited forms and intellectual approach was described in a review of the show by the critic Sidney Tillim as “both old and new at the same time.” Indeed, the early 1960s hard-edge works of painters such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, in which the pictorial structure is reduced to coloristic planes related to the shape of the canvas may be related to Diller’s art of the period, while other artists who combined a Minimalist hard-edge approach with a concern for mood also have an affinity with Diller, including the California painters Lorser Feitelson, Helen Lundeberg, and Karl Benjamin, the Washington Color School painter Howard Mehring, and the Chicago artist Angelo Testa.

Burgoyne Diller’s place as a precursor as well as a participant in the development of Minimalism was acknowledged in the years following his death in 1965. Lawrence Campbell wrote of Diller in 1968, “He was known and respected by the avant-garde of his own generation, and during his final years had become a kind of hero to the young avant-garde of the 1960s. For this new generation Diller was one of the few who seemed absolutely free of the rules and attributes of abstract art which developed in the 1930s.” Campbell further suggested that Diller’s last works themselves belong to the new era, stating: “Diller simplified and purified abstract art and was himself a Minimal or Primary Structure artist at the end.” When a retrospective of Diller’s work was held at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, held in 1971, Robert Pincus-Witten wrote: “Through a tenacious belief in the symbolic power of a spare, formalist vernacular, Diller, while producing works alien to the conventional styles of the early ’60s, is able to succeed today in convincing the spectator of the value of his enterprise. The exposure of this work enormously assists in understanding certain Ellsworth Kellys as well as Kelly’s relation to Mondrian.”

As this exhibition suggests, Burgoyne Diller’s reductive, nonobjective images created both a legacy and a connecting link between earlier and later modes of abstraction explored by twentieth-century American artists.

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View more artwork by Burgoyne Diller

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