particular, was so influential in Diller's life that when Diller had his solo exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston) in New York City, he had Hofmann write the introduction for the catalogue. Critical Reception During Diller's lifetime, abstract art was not very popular. Abstract artists struggled to gain any form of publicity. Diller noted "your so-called big institutions...were supposed to have done so much for the artists, you know, in the past, the Museum of Modern Art, and so on - - I don't think they had a prohibition against showing American abstract painters, but they didn't show them. They showed very, very few of them." 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. In a review of the Burgoyne Diller exhibit in the Paula Cooper Gallery in November 2001, art critic Donald Kuspit said the following about Diller's attempt to replicate the stylings of his idol Mondrian: "[Diller] was the first American to take Mondrian as his model. Already in the 1930s he was producing works with a geometric sophistication similar to that of the Dutch artist. But Diller never quite got Mondrian's metaphysical point, nor did his work have Mondrian's restraint, his determination to make less count for more, expressively and cognitively. Diller's abstractions, on the contrary, tend to be overloaded and acrobatic: the more angles and rectangles, the better. Such feats of skill and busyness are beside the point of Mondrian's idealism." 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. This occurs under the influence not of Mondrian but of Malevich. Again and again we see Diller grandly setting up a central square adumbrated by lesser geometrical entities. The result is often reminiscent of Josef Albers's homages to the square, which in fact were contemporary with Diller's drawings and collages. One wonders who was looking over whose shoulder, or whether they were simply on the same wavelength. Diller's geometry seems more spirited and less redundant than Albers's--more Malevichean. One dark square with various agitated rectangles