Georges Valmier was born in Angoulême the 11th of April, 1885. At the age of five, in 1890, his family moved to Montmartre, where the young Valmier was educated in the arts, especially in painting but also in music, which was taught to him by his father, a military band leader and music teacher.

From his childhood, the young Valmier showed a great ability for drawing, but it was only after the return of his military service in 1905 that he started drafting his first works: portraits of his relatives in intimate atmospheres and landscapes with fragmented touch and colored shadows. In 1906, he joined a free academy, the Academy Humbert, located at 184 boulevard de Clichy, where he was noticed by the director, Ferdinand Humbert.

In 1907, Valmier discovered Cézanne during a retrospective dedicated to him by the Salon d'Automne. The same year in 1907, Valmier joined the Beaux Arts Academy, thanks to a recommendation letter from Ferdinand Humbert, and followed the teaching of Luc-Olivier Merson until 1909.

After leaving the Beaux Arts Academy, which he considered too classical, Georges Valmier was moving towards a new mode of expression, resulting from the influence of Cézanne. When the Cubist movement began to spread, Valmier made self-portraits, portraits, still-lifes and landscapes of Montmartre, simplifying volumes by emphasizing the geometry of forms. His approach was confirmed and built around a series of still lifes and landscapes with the same characteristics: broken volumes, planes become prism facets, dynamic diagonal  marking his compositions. At that time, Valmier was still working alone and he did not know of other Cubists artists.

In 1913, Valmier decided to exhibit for the first time at the Salon des Independants. He presented a still life, a nude, a portrait and a landscape entitled Vue du canal Saint Martin, showing his desire to belong to the new artistic movement.

In 1914, he exhibited again in this same Salon a nude, a still life and a portrait titled Portrait de Madame Renaud. Valmier was then noticed by the art critic André Salmon, who described his work as post-Cubist.

This new visibility was interrupted by the First World War. Mobilized in 1914 and assigned in Toul, he was serving as a nurse and met with Albert Gleizes and Florent Schmitt. The artistic production of Valmier was then limited to sketchbooks, where he drafted landscapes, soldiers, portraits and figures in a schematic and allusive style with pencil, ink and watercolor.

Back in Montmartre, after the end of the war, Valmier pursued his work in the studio rue Ramey. In 1919, thanks to his friends Albert Gleizes and Florent Schmitt, Georges Valmier met with Léonce Rosenberg, the Director of the gallery l’Effort Moderne in Paris, where Rosenberg exibited works by Gleizes, Herbin, Mondrian, Fernand Léger, etc.

From 1919, his paintings lost their austere character. Most of these paintings are figures in broken planes, where shapes overlap in large areas of bright colour, almost abstract. The use of dotted surfaces or drawn elements evoke the processes used by Picasso in the synthetic phase of Cubism. It is from this period of the end of the first war that Valmier would precede his paintings with preparatory gouaches, made on very thin paper whose variations of colors, both delicate and bold, allows to measure the subtlety of his work and the path of the painter to the final oil.

In 1920, he signed a contract with Léonce Rosenberg which would only stop at the artist's death in 1937. The following year, in 1921, Léonce Rosenberg organized a solo exhibition dedicated to Valmier’s work in his gallery L'Effort Moderne. The same year, Valmier exhibited at the exhibition Les Maîtres du Cubisme. From that moment on, Valmier further simplified his compositions, enlarging the geometric planes and removing details and anecdotal evidence that helped the reading of the work. He even made a few entirely abstract paintings. Valmier realized eurythmic structures by arranging geometric shapes, clearly delineated by the contrasting colours. He wrote himself "With the current visual manifestations, colour takes its true meaning, its own life [...]."

In 1922, classical figurative themes resurfaced in Valmier’s work, including many still-lifes. The art of Valmier flourished in these stable and balanced compositions, with bright colors and jobless brand, evoking the Purist movement. That same year, 1922, Valmier had for the first time the opportunity to create the sets and costumes for nine futuristic pieces of Italian group led by Marinetti in the Art et Action Theatre. From 1922 to 1926, Valmier became interested in theater researches showing a willingness to experiment with other forms of expression. He designed the sets and costumes for many plays for the Art et Action theater but also other parts like Cyprien or L’Amour à 18 ans of George Pillement (1923), Aucassin and Nicolette (1923), Isabelle et Pantalon( 1924) or ballets such as La farce du Pont-Neuf (1926). Valmier's activity in the area of ​​the scene should not be separated from his painting work. Rather, they are part of the same dynamic. This consistency involved the desire of a total art, one accessible to all. This desire to search for new forms of expression and to integrate art and life led him to achieve both sets and costumes for theater and ballet, as models for fabrics, carpets or objects. The culmination of his many research would result in the publication in 1930 of a set of decorative motifs, united in a portfolio that summarized more than ten years of study.

From 1923 to 1927, Valmier regularly published his works in Le Bulletin de l’Effort Moderne. However, in 1927, the gallery L'Effort Moderne found some financial difficulties due to the economic conjecture. Yet Rosenberg asked Valmier to continue to send paintings and gouaches, and as a sign of affection, Rosenberg asked Valmier to decorate the dining room of his apartment that housed his collections in 1928.

From 1925 to 1929, under the leadership of Rosenberg, Valmier expanded his manner through paintings of larger size. He then joined characters in geometric patterns like La Fête Foraine (1925), Le Bal Musette (1927) or Le Cirque (1927).

In the early 30s, Valmier participated in several exhibitions in New York, Vienna or Warsaw. He also exhibited in Paris at the Galerie de l’Effort Moderne, the Galerie Briant-Robert, the Galerie des Beaux-Arts and the Salon des Independants. Reviving definitely with abstraction, he became one of the most active members of the group Abstraction-Creation that will play a key role in the evolution of non-figurative art. From the beginning of the group, he is a board member of Abstraction-Création, with Jean Arp, Albert Gleizes, Jean Helion, Kupka, Leon Tutundjian and Vantongerloo; and the Hungarian painter Alfred Reth with who he collaborates. He participated in numerous events until the group was dislocated in 1936. At that time, the works of Valmier were characterized by abstract shapes, with dominant curves, often disks or circles connected by dots.

He began working in 1936 on three monumental works for the decoration of the theater of the Palace of Railways of the Universal Exhibition in 1937. These three works, a sort of culmination of his approach, show us the capacity of Valmier for renewal and his ability to fit into the taste of his time. Unfortunately, Valmier did not have time to appreciate the result. He died of a heart attack on March 25, 1937, in Montmartre.

His work crosses the great modern movements of the history of painting, from his Impressionist beginnings to Cubism, that he discovers at the age of 25, and finally to abstract from 1921. Valmier was also a musician, he was a friend of Darius Milhaud, sings Debussy, Ravel, Fauré and Satie in major concerts in churches, and has also a decisive influence on the career of André Jolivet.