John Sennhauser (1907-1978) was a Swiss-born American painter whose long career carried him from urban Realist beginnings through geometric abstraction and eventually back toward a more fluid figurative practice. Born in Switzerland but raised in Italy, Sennhauser pursued his early artistic training at the Royal Academy in Venice for two years before immigrating to the United States in 1928. This unusually rich European foundation gave him a deep engagement with both the classical and modern painterly traditions of Europe, and it shaped his sensibility throughout his life.

In New York, Sennhauser continued his studies at the Cooper Union School from 1930 to 1933, receiving the American academic training that would combine with his European foundation to produce his distinctive mature vocabulary. He then taught at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School and the Contemporary School of Art in New York, mentoring younger American artists while continuing to develop his own practice. In 1943 he took a position at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and it was around this time that his paintings began to move decisively away from the representational urban street scenes of his early career and toward the geometric abstraction that would define his mature work.

After two years at the Guggenheim, Sennhauser left the institution and began working in art restoration, a technically demanding profession that gave him intimate familiarity with the surface qualities and material history of paintings by other artists. Alongside this specialized work he became increasingly active in the professional artistic organizations that supported abstract art in America, including the American Abstract Artists and the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. His participation in these groups placed him within the important community of American abstract painters who were shaping the direction of postwar American art.

Like many of the Abstract Expressionist painters of his era, Sennhauser eventually returned to more figurative work during the 1960s. These later paintings were more fluid and lyrical than the strong geometric compositions he had produced from the late 1930s through the 1950s, and they reflected his ongoing willingness to reinvent his practice at successive stages of his career. His paintings are held today in significant American museum and private collections, where they remain valued examples of the mid-century American abstract tradition.