John Sennhauser (1907–1978) was a painter whose career bridged European training and the development of modern American abstraction. Born in Switzerland and raised in Italy, he studied for two years at the Royal Academy in Venice before immigrating to the United States in 1928. After settling in New York, he continued his studies at the Cooper Union School from 1930 to 1933, immersing himself in the city’s dynamic artistic environment.

Sennhauser later taught at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School and the Contemporary School of Art in New York. In 1943 he accepted a position at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, a period that proved significant in the evolution of his work. Around this time his paintings began to shift away from the representational urban street scenes of his early career toward a more abstract visual language.

After leaving the Guggenheim two years later, Sennhauser worked in art restoration while becoming increasingly active in progressive artistic organizations, including American Abstract Artists and the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. During the late 1930s through the 1950s his work often displayed a strong geometric structure aligned with the concerns of early American abstraction. Like many artists associated with the Abstract Expressionist era, however, Sennhauser returned to more figurative imagery during the 1960s. These later works retained the lessons of abstraction while adopting a more fluid and expressive approach than the tightly structured compositions of his earlier period.