Victor Thall (a.k.a. Thal) was born in New York on January 5, 1902. His formal art education began at age eleven with weekend classes for youth at the Art Students League in Manhattan. There he studied under Arthur B. Davies, George Bellows, George Luks, and John Sloan. At that time he was introduced to Expressionism through the famous 1913 Armory Show, which effectively brought the genre to the U.S. from Europe. This would remain both an influential and controversial experience for the young artist, who would later reject the Expressionist label. Following his time at the League, he moved to Philadelphia to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

He left for Paris in 1924, continuing his studies at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, the Academie Julien, and the Grande Chaumiere. Returning to the United States in the early 1930’s, he became friendly with Willem de Kooning and Arshile Gorky. He participated in the WPA New Deal Art Project of New York City between 1935 and 1939 and taught at the Art Students League in the late 1940s. In 1949 and '50 he was represented in the Whitney Annual of Contemporary American Painting, the latter of which earned him recognition as of one of the two best American painters by a New Yorker art critic.

Thall's star was on the rise in the new and exciting genre, first known as the New York School before being relabled as Abstract Expressionism. However, he chafed being categorized, and in the early 1950s he left New York on a whim, telling de Kooning that he had swapped a painting for a Packard station wagon and was leaving the city. He began traveling internationally, attempting to find a solution to what he perceived as the crisis of abstraction. Thall lived and painted in Mexico, the West Indies, and Europe. Much of his work of the late 1950s was done in Torrevieja, a fishing village in Spain, and in Palma de Mallorca. He returned to New York in 1963, leaving for Florida in 1965.

Thall relocated in the late 1960s to a small village outside Palm Springs, California. There he painted until the late 1970s, then embarked on writing a semiautobiographical novel that consumed his artistic output until his death in 1983. The novel remains unpublished.

Victor Thall died on June 1, 1983 in Snow Creek, CA.