Born into a family of twelve children whose father was a farm worker, he grew up in extreme poverty where three of his brothers and sisters died of hunger and two committed suicide. Without schooling, he was successively interned in a reformatory and then a psychiatric hospital where he paradoxically acquired the rudiments of writing and drawing.
Arriving in France, he worked a series of subsistence jobs: steelworker, rubber factory employee, brewery dishwasher, house painter and decorator, all while developing his artistic practice. He married Irène Setruk on December 2, 1937, a union that accompanied him until the end of his life.
His first exhibition at the Salon des Indépendants in 1939 revealed his unique style, incorporating matches and nails into his compositions. A volunteer during the war, he was taken prisoner and then mistakenly released. On March 30, 1943, during the deportation of European Jews, he found refuge at Sainte-Anne, where he stayed until August 21, 1944, painting poignant portraits of people in despair.
The year 1950 marked his dual literary and artistic emergence with the publication of his novel and his participation in the First Exhibition of Psychopathological Art. His works, compared to those of Céline, Miller, and Artaud, raise questions about the nature of his internment: calculated refuge or real pathology?
The incident in January 1953, in which he struck Madame Paul Pétridès and was brought to justice, fueled his sulphurous reputation. The exhibition "Schwarz-Abrys - Twenty Paintings on Madness" organized by Samedi Soir in May-June 1953 exploited this morbid fascination of the time with alienated creation.
His last decades saw a thematic diversification: landscapes of Saint-Affrique (1955), Breton wrecks, horses, portraits of the "people of the Pantheon" (1959), Corsican landscapes (1960) and Irish landscapes (1964). From 1970 onwards, he gradually isolated himself, his last public appearances dating from 1988 to sign a monograph. His death in 1990 ended a career marked by the ambiguity between creative authenticity and strategic simulation, a questioning that he himself summed up: "I admit to a certain crack, of a kind unknown to psychiatrists."
