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| Following his immigration
to New York from Switzerland in 1928, Sennhauser enrolled at the Cooper
Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. The ideas about
modernism
he was exposed to there transformed the artist
and supplanted the conservative training he had received in Europe.
Soon he was exploring geometric abstraction and becoming, in the process,
part of the second generation of modernists working in the United
States—those who came to maturity during the 1930s, 1940s, and
1950s. By 1942 Sennhauser had become both a lecturer and art installer on the staff of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting under the direction of Baroness Hilla Rebay. (She had championed the leading artists of the European avant-garde, especially Wassily Kandinsky and his followers, and had acted as an advisor to Solomon R. Guggenheim before the opening of the museum he founded in 1939.) The Museum of Non-Objective Painting was an environment perfectly suited to Sennhauser’s own modernist interests and greatly influenced his development. When he left the institution in 1945 Sennhauser joined the American Abstract Artists, a group dedicated to the promotion of abstraction through exhibitions and the exchange of ideas. Beginning in the mid-1950s he worked as a paper restorer and designer of murals until he moved to Escondido, California, in 1973.  (For Grades K-2) What patterns do you see that repeat themselves? How many different types of lines can you find? (straight, curved, thick, thin, horizontal, vertical, diagonal) What primary colors do you see? (red, yellow) What secondary colors do you see? (orange, shades of green) How many different shades of green can you find? Yellow? What kind of music does this painting remind you of? |
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John Sennhauser United States (born Switzerland), 1907 -1978 Synchroformic #18 - Horizontal Duo Oil on board, 1951 Gift from the estate of John Sennhauser 1998:80 (c) San Diego Museum of Art |
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