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.

[3] Diller ended up leaving the Art Students League in 1933 and took up a position with the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

[6] In 1930 Diller married Sarah "Sally" Bernadette Conboy, who worked in the classified department of The New York Times.

[4] Contributing to the problems in his life was Sally's own alcoholism which led to her death in 1954 of cirrhosis of the liver, just months after she had retired from The New York Times.

That same summer, while visiting his mother and stepfather in Michigan, Diller met Grace Kelso LaCrone who had just separated from her husband.

He died that very year at the age of 59 due to complications of heart disease and pulmonary edema while at the French Hospital in Manhattan.

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

"[4] "For Diller, abstraction was the ideal realm of harmony, stability and order in which every form and spatial interval could be controlled and measured.

"[4] "His style began with forms of modernism, including cubism, Kandinsky's abstraction, constructivism, and other European models.

"[6] "He simplified his palette to the bold colors and black and white of neoplasticism and reduced his visual vocabulary to squares and rectangles."

"[5] "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.

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.

During his tenure at the WPA, "Diller championed abstract art and oversaw the execution of more than 200 public murals, most of which were completed as part of this large undertaking".

Among the principal artists Diller selected for this project were Jan Matulka, Stuart Davis, and Paul Kelpe, who were all permitted to execute their own designs."

Some of the major abstract murals supervised by Diller during this time include those at the Newark Airport by Gorky and the Williamsburg Housing Project by Bolotowsky.

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.

"[8] Although Diller had numerous exhibitions before and after World War II, his work attracted very little public attention and it was not until the last few years of his life that he was generally acknowledged as one of the best American abstract artists of his generation.

"[9] 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.

The result is often reminiscent of Josef Albers's homages to the square, which in fact were contemporary with Diller's drawings and collages.

"[9] "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.”[4] "Diller will always be remembered as one of the most significant artists devoted to geometric abstraction, and a true pioneer of American modernism.

"[7] 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.