Son of a French father and a Flemish mother, Marcel Gromaire began his education in Douai, before reaching Paris, where his father taught at the Lycee Buffon. Gromaire passes his law degree but quickly abandoned the legal profession In 1910 he began to frequent some workshops in Montparnasse (Colarossi, Ranson and La Palette). As Rouault and Dufy, Marcel Gromaire worked away from groups and artistic currents. Friend of Henri Matisse and Fernand Léger in his youth, he was never a student of any painter. He exhibited in 1911 at the Salon des Independents where he was quickly noticed. Gromaire then found passion for Romanesque, Gothic and primitive arts.

He did his military service in Lille and was mobilized during World War I, fighting on the fronts of Alsace and Somme. He spent six years in the army. Wounded in 1916 in the Somme, he is brought back to Paris for treatment. He published some of his drawings on the war in Le Crapouillot (1916-1918).

Once in Paris, Gromaire is interested in engraving. Recommended by Emile Laboureur he carves thirty wood of various sizes between 1918 and 1925. Eventually, he also takes interest in etching, which technique he soon gave his preference. Apart from a few plates taken by his friend Pierre Dubreuil on his personal press, most of Gromaire etchings were printed by Paul Haasen and his son Raymond. Of some two hundred engravings on wood and twenty engravings on metal, one hundred and fifty were made between the two wars.

By 1919 Gromaire takes position for a classical painting as an expression of his time in L’Art moderne et notes sur l’art d’aujourd’hui, which he published in 1919. He pleads for figurative and realistic painting and claims the importance of the subject. His first solo exhibition is organized in 1921. In a painting like Le Faucheur (1924, Museum of Modern Art), severe mold design identifies sculptural and powerful masses, sometimes reduced to géométric patterns. The use of the traditional perspective and a certain thoroughness in execution are the pictorial foundations of this work. The 1920-1930 canvases remain outside of the cubist or abstract revolution: the painter continues his search for a representation that he wants to dissociate from past models. Dark and austere, the chromatic range of Gromaire is limited to a few colors, even if it sometimes lighted up by large red or blue touches. Gromairealways stayed loyal to a certain naturalism, and his thematic repertoire is a striking testimony (nudes, peasants, fishermen, card players, soldiers, landscapes). Nothing is more significant in this regard that the painting entitled La Guerre (1925, Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris), where the artist transform the human body by simplifying forms, but which is anchored to the signs of the reality.

He met with the Dr. Maurice Girardin who, for ten years, bought by contract all of his production. He moved in 1925 to the Villa Seurat in the Fifteenth arrondissement of Paris where he continues to write his personal notes until the end of his life. He also became a teacher at the Atelier B of the Scandinavian Academy.

In 1933, the retrospective of his work held at the Kunsthalle Basel is a consecration. In 1934 he published a manifesto in the journal Esprit, "Art, invention of the concrete." The artist creates in 1937 murals for the pavillon of the Sèvres porcelain factory during the Universal Exhibition of Paris.

After 1937, the painter is interested in tapestry and claims that it is an independant medium of expression of its own. He will then create monumental works with extremely simple and effective means: one of the main objectives of the reform that began Gromaire at the Gobelins is to fight against the use of colors in large numbers and to stick to a limited register (Les Quatre Eléments, 1938-1939; Les Quatre Saisons, 1941). During the war, from 1939 to 1944, he stayed in Aubusson in the Creuse and participates to the renovation of the art of tapestry with Jean Lurcat. Gromaire participated in the liberation of Paris in 1944 and became, four years later, Vice President of the National Union of intellectuals, which was an organisation linked to the Resistance.

In 1947 he made his first exhibition at the gallery Louis Carré. In 1950, he was appointed professor at the National School of Decorative Arts, where he remained twelve years. That same year, 1950, he went to the United States as a jury member of the Carnegie Prize, this year, awarded to Jacques Villon. This same prize will be awarded to Gromaire himself in 1952. From the journey he made in America (1950), his paintings reflect a new trend. The colors are more vivid, the architecture of the body more flexible, more nuanced, despite the permanence of a strong and rigorous design (New York vers l’océan, 1950, private collection; Nu à la grande chevelure blonde, 1957, coll. part.). Gromaire is also an excellent draftsman and an outstanding illustrator (Petits Poèmes en prose by Baudelaire, 1962 ;  Shakespeare's Macbeth, 1958). Among the painters of the second generation of the twentieth century, the artist appears as one of the strongest and most faithful to the tradition of European painting.

Gromaire died in 1971 after a long hospitalization. In 1980, a retrospective was dedicated to him at the Modern Art Museum of the City of Paris thanks to the collection of Dr. Girardin, who offered a hundred works of Gromaire to the museum. Gromaire painted a little over seven hundred canvases, with an average of ten per year, seventy eight, only in the collection of Dr. Girardin. He also realised a set of large drawings and watercolors, which are kept, for the most of them, at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Gromaire only made a few watercolors, produced, such as oils, at the rate of about ten a year. The intellectual impact of Gromaire makes him the spokesman of the independent art during the years 20-50.