MINNEAPOLIS: BURGOYNE DILLER
THE EXHIBITION OF BURGOYNE DILLER’S work held at the Walker Art Center (which will subsequently travel to the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts and the Pasadena Art Museum) represents an imposing attempt to illuminate the singularly important problem of the relationship of Mondrian to American reductivist abstraction. Burgoyne Diller, by virtue of a fixated extrapolation of the lessons of Mondrian, as well as his close connections to New York art in the 1930s and ’40s, is perhaps the most vital expression we have of a doctrinaire position in the service of de Stijl. What is remarkable is not that a major oeuvre can be shown to derive from such a connection, but more: a production of high stature was realized in the bargain, a stature not usually felt in the presence of the work of other American artists equally associated with the name of Mondrian—such as Ilya Bolotowsky, Fritz Glarner, Harry Holtzman, Leon Polk Smith, or Alice Trumbull Mason.
The exhibition was largely organized by Philip Larson, an assistant curator at the Walker Art Center, who is to be congratulated on the seriousness of his intentions, although his catalogue essay tends to gloss and often reduce issues to an almost cryptic vagueness. Unfortunately, he chooses to begin his retrospective survey after Diller has already been attracted to the utopian premises of neo-Plasticism, so that what Mondrian meant to Diller on a “reactive” level is not made clear. Still, the generation which adopted the absolutes of Mondrian all began as representational painters, an assumption I make in the case of Diller as well. The inference then is that the symbolism implicit in neo-Plasticism corresponded to the new orders which sympathizers of both right and left persuasion all hoped would be brought about by either dictatorial fascism or a worker’s revolution. Certainly the implacable theorems of de Stijl correspond to the larger climate of a decade equally committed to conformist postulates of social behavior. Larson introduces us to Diller in the late ’30s, and indicates that Diller’s career can be viewed as a kind of braiding of three themes across time. The first is the exposition of the basic plane; the second, the movement caused by constant vertical and horizontal interplay; and the third, the introduction of a free counterpoint, a colored rectangle either positioned against the basic plane or located on the canvas at those edges formed by the meeting of vertical and horizontal lines.
Since, in fact, this conception of the artist’s method is based on a theoretical drawing taken from Diller’s 1961 notebook, I cannot really argue against so schematized a presentation of an artist’s career. However, the effect of the exhibition does not suggest so absolute an overview, one which implies the omniscience of the artist with regard not only to where he has been or where he is at, but where, as well, he is going. Much hesitation and indecisiveness may be inferred from the tormented private life of Diller.
My reading of the exhibition is somewhat different from Larson’s. I see Diller’s career to be more of a response to certain problems posed in Mondrian’s paintings either of the 1920s and ’30s, or of Mondrian’s American phase in the ’40s. Notably Diller often solves these problems in ways which would be entirely anathematic to Mondrian himself.
The first apparent group of distinct types occurs in the late ’30s. They are executed with a more complex and lyrical sensibility than one associates with Mondrian’s work of the 1920s from which they nevertheless derive. These particular Mondrians often bring colored rectangles out to the edge, often stop the black lines short of the edge, and sometimes employ peculiar primary colors such as orangey reds. Diller’s pictures tend to an eccentric contrast between thick and thin and exploit an aggressive sense of overlap which has hardly any counterpart in Mondrian. Diller’s work of the late ’30s elicits the constructed reliefs which begin to appear at this time as well. These sculptures are modestly scaled and are important because they establish the models of the Mondrianizing sculptural efforts such as are found in the early work of Theodore Roszak and the early Sidney Gordin too.
In the mid-1940s when Diller’s awareness of Mondrian is first hand (although he and Harry Holtzman had visited the master in Paris in the late 1930s), Diller is drawn to the near electrical leaps of color imbedded in Mondrian’s lines in Broadway Boogie Woogie and Victory Boogie Woogie. This was a fundamental change in the Dutch artist’s work, as it is in the linear tectonics of these American paintings that the color of the work is to be found rather than within the rectangles occasioned by the vertical and horizontal grids. As Mondrian himself said, “So I came to making lines and brought colour within these lines. Now the only problem was to destroy these lines through mutual opposition.”
This change in Mondrian’s paintings was profoundly instructive to Diller and represents as well Diller’s most conclusive development, the basketlike weaves of primary color in which horizontal bars of color bind together a vertical system of black lines. The color induces a spatial visual activity denied by the black vertical but corroborated by the white rectangles which in these paintings function less as impenetrable surface and more as a metaphor of space or air. Mondrian, suddenly, has been left behind.
In my experience of the periods of Diller’s productivity it would seem that the mid-1950s mark the nadir of his effort. Very little is shown of this moment and it may be that the thinness of this period’s production results from Diller’s alcoholism, although the converse is probably equally true. From the early ’60s until his death in 1965, Diller emerged again from this nihilistic cycle and is revealed as an artist of extraordinary stature, one who may be regarded as such for several reasons: 1) because he was able to alter the effect of received information which argues against an entire meaning in the context of Mondrian; and 2) because his work heroically offers another convincing alternative to the prevailing issues of so-called modernist art of this period.
The last works indicate two types. There are several paintings of large square gray fields upon which blue and yellow rectangles have been distributed. These suggest an affiliation. with Albers but remain quite free of Albers’ devitalizing obsession with the optical gymnastics of color. The other group presents a rectangular format and largely plays with black vertical fields into which the large primary colored rectangles enter, often from the top, or often pinned to the edge of the rectangle. The thrust of these works is frontal and symmetrical and by a simple spatial projection become the theoretical models for the formica sculptures that occupy the late production as well. Originally, these sculptures were to be executed in granite or in steel but, in fact, Diller has been well served in their having been mocked up for obvious economic reasons in colored formica. There is something about the matte and implacable chromatic opacity of formica which allows for a clear one-to-one correspondence between the last paintings and the sculptures themselves, a correspondence which, were they made of steel and/or granite, would have stressed overmuch an affiliation with David Smith. In this way Smith is alluded to; but in the end, the sense of Smith’s being there never gets in the way. Moreover, instead of these works becoming Minimal sculptures in the manner of Ronald Bladen, Tony Smith, or Donald Judd, they occupy a bracketing position between David Smith and the architectural/sculptural ambitions of the mid-’60s, but one which is fed by a much older non-Cubist position in the 20th century.
It would seem that a commitment to a small range of visual possibilities would, in our time, make Diller appear little more than a period figure. Certainly the virtual neglect of this artist is based on such prejudice. Curiously another attitude entirely is evoked by the exhibition. The prevailing effect is one of dignity and single-mindedness—a commitment rendered either ironic or tragic, perhaps, since this mode of expression runs countercurrent to the nominally “successful” American styles of the early ’60s.
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. It also illuminates aspects of Nassos Daphnis’ production in this context. The Walker Art Center has every reason to be proud of having so vitally resuscitated and refurbished the nearly forgotten reputation and work of one of America’s finest loners.
—Robert Pincus-Witten
