John Sennhauser | Biography | Hollis Taggart Galleries

John Sennhauser (1907-1978)

Born in Rorschach, Switzerland, in 1907, John Sennhauser arrived in New York in 1928, after several years of study at the Royal Academy in Venice. Beginning his career as an architectural draftsman, from 1930 to 1933 he studied at Cooper Union, where his classes sparked his interest in abstraction. However,
Sennhauser initially favored a realist style and first became known for deftly painted urban street scenes.

From 1936 to 1939, he taught at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School and the Contemporary School of Art. In 1943, Sennhauser took a position as a lecturer and an assistant to curator Hilla Rebay at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. He had already begun shifting his focus to non-objective geometric art and he continued to pursue this direction under Rebay’s influence. By 1945, however, Sennhauser had grown frustrated with Rebay’s ideological rigidity. He resigned from his position, but remained an active proponent of abstract art for years to come.

Sennhauser joined the American Abstract Artists group in 1945 and served as its secretary and treasurer from 1950 to 1952. In addition to painting, worked as a restorer during the 1950s and 1960s. Sennhauser gradually returned to figurative painting, first in watercolors from the late 1950s and later in expressionistic canvases exhibited in 1961 and after. He died in 1978.