Painter, printmaker, theater set designer, and illustrator Otto Schubert was born in Dresden, Germany (then the German Empire), on January 29, 1892. His formal art and design studies began in 1906 at the Dreseden School of Arts and Crafts. From 1909 to 1913, he worked as a stage painter at Dresden's Court Theater, followed by enrollment at the Dresden Art Academy where he studied graphic design and printmaking under Emanuel Hegenbarth. 

After his military conscription from 1914 to 1917, he returned to the Academy and completed his masters in painting and graphic art under Otto Gussman and Otto Hettner, receiving the Grand State Prize in 1918. As he gained recognition for his talents he was approached by German Impressionist and art critic Julius Meier-Graefe, who hired him as an illustrator for his various published works, commissioning numerous lithographs by Schubert throughout the 1920s. He was a member of the Reich CHamber of Fine Arts and exhibited frequently throughout Germany. Despite his standing in the German art world, the majority of his works from this time, including paintings and drawings held by collectors and museums, were destroyed by the Nazi government during World War II when, as with many of his Modernist contemporaries, his work was deemed "degenerate."

Following the war, Schubert continued to live and work in Dresden, and was a member of the Association of Visual Artists of the DGR, founded in 1952. He died in Dresden in 1970.