Jacques Hérold, painter, printmaker, illustrator, and sculptor, was born Herold Blumer in the town of Moldavia, Romania on October 10, 1910. He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Bucharest between 1925 and 1929. Not wanting to become an academic painter, Hérold abandoned his formal education and became an architectural draftsman. During this time, he discovered the avant-garde artists' publication 75HP, which inspired him to travel to Paris in 1930.

Upon his arrival in Paris he changed his name to Jacques Hérold. He worked for Constantin Brancusi and met Victor Braun, Yves Tanguy and André Breton and, in 1934, he officially joined Breton's Surrealist group. Hérold exhibited at the Salon d’Automne beginning in 1936, and, in the late 1940s, his work was included in all the major Surrealism exhibitions. His first solo exhibition was mounted in 1947. In the 1950s, Hérold studied under Stanley William Hayter at his experimental workshop Atelier 17 alongside Europe’s leading experimental printmakers.

Hérold was also an illustrator and he designed covers and illustrations for more than eighty books by renowned authors. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington; Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique; the Musuem of Modern Art, Liege; the Musée Cantini, Marseilles; Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderne e Contemporanea, Rome; National Museum of Modern Art, Centre George Pompidou; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Jacques Hérold remained an active artist until his death in Paris on January 11, 1987. In 2010, the Musée Cantini in Marseilles mounted an exhibition, Jacques Hérold et le Surréalism.