In 1971, as a graduate student, I became an abstract painter after seeing the big Mondrian retrospective at the Guggenheim. What I learned from Mondrian was that abstraction is fundamental. In his Neoplastic style, all the means of painting are considered—tonal color, pure hue, lines as contours, flat shapes, modeled form, and so on; some are pursued, many others rejected. In that choice of conventions lies not only the basis of a style, but of painting itself. So for artists who come after Mondrian, it seems that there are many ways to work out of Mondrian, learn from Mondrian. This is why Mondrian is a great teacher of painting. He is a foundation upon which many sorts of painters have found that they can build.

The recent Burgoyne Diller retrospective at the Whitney brought back that coup de foudre I’d experienced almost twenty years ago on the ramps of the Guggenheim Museum.[1]Diller (1906-1965) was an American painter whose own acquaintance with Mondrian had been very much an act of artistic will. As a young painter in New York in the early 1930s, Diller was able to see only a few Mondrians (or works by other De Stijl painters) hanging in semi-public collections, and maybe a few more in the pages of the French art magazines. From these very small indications, Diller put together for himself the basis of a career, and as early as 1934, a twenty-eight-year-old freshly out of the Art Students League, he had