being created. He was awarded a patent for the invention in 1945. He was released from active duty after World War II in November 1945 as a lieutenant (junior grade) and remained in the naval reserve until 1954, retiring with the rank of lieutenant. During his time in active duty, he stopped creating art altogether. However, once the war ended, he took up art once again. In 1946 Diller was hired as an assistant professor at Brooklyn College and was soon promoted to a full-time position. He was granted tenure at the college in 1949. He remained on the faculty until his death in 1965. In 1930 Diller married Sarah "Sally" Bernadette Conboy, who worked in the classified department of The New York Times. "Her steady income helped the couple maintain a modest lifestyle throughout the Depression." By the early 1950s, Diller began creating art at a very inconsistent rate due to "mounting personal problems, excessive alcohol consumption, and a sense of rejection by an art world dominated by Abstract Expressionists." In 1959, Diller's studio flooded and none of the artwork he had stored in his basement could be salvaged. 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. They never had any children. That same summer, while visiting his mother and stepfather in Michigan, Diller met Grace Kelso LaCrone who had just separated from her husband. Once her divorce was finalized, she and Diller married in 1955. They too never had any children together. In his later years, Diller moved to Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, where his home and studio were both near the shore. By 1965 Diller's health had seriously declined after years of smoking and alcohol abuse. 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. Style "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