Theo Tobiasse was born in Israel in 1927 to Lithuanian parents. Due to financial difficulty, at a young age, Tobiasse was forced to move to Kovno then Paris, where his father attempted to find work as a typographer. These moves greatly affected Tobiasse, and the themes of exile and displacement are often found in his works.

Tobiasse began his formal artist training at the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, but his education was cut short during World War II when discriminatory laws forced him to leave school for confinement in his family’s apartment for two years. When the war was over, Tobiasse had amassed a plethora of drawings that helped him launch a career in design and advertising, which he did for fifteen years in Paris and Nice. Tobiasse devoted himself entirely to painting in 1962 after a successful exhibition in Nice