Background
His father died when he was only four, forcing him to earn a living in a steel mill from an early age.
His father died when he was only four, forcing him to earn a living in a steel mill from an early age.
Born on 11 June 1913, he was the sixth of seven children in a working-class family in Rumelange in the south of Luxembourg. During the Second World War, the Germans deported him after his refusal to join the Volksdeutsche Bewegung but they later brought him back to work in the Belval steel factory where he remained for the rest of his working life. Without any formal education, he started to paint as a child using a paintbox he had found in a dustbin.
He developed his own abilities from the 1940s, soon to be influenced by the lyrical abstract imagery of the Paris School after he went to the 1947 exhibition of French art in Luxembourg City.