Synchroformic #18 - Horizontal Duo

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

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.

Discussion Questions

(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?