Carl Max Schultheiss, engraver, book designer, and fresco painter, was born in Nuremberg on 4 August 1885. He studied at the Royal School of Applied Arts in Nuremberg and at the Munich Academy under Wilhelm von Diez. Schultheiss emigrated from Germany to the United Kingdom in May 1939 and in March 1940 he arrived in the United States.

As early as 1928, Schultheiss was exhibiting with the Print Makers Society of California in their 9th International Print Makers Exhibition, and he was included in the 1930 Chicago Society of Etchers exhibition. He began exhibiting with the Society of American Etchers (then known as the Brooklyn Society of Etchers) in 1940 and, in 1943 and 1944 he was awarded the John Taylor Arms Prize at the Annual Exhibition of the Society of American Etchers. He was awarded a grant from the National Institute of Art and Letters in 1953.

Schultheiss was a member of the Society of American Etchers, the Audubon Artists in New York City, the Chicago Society of Etchers, the Print Makers Society of California, the Laguna Beach Art Association, and in 1946 he was elected a full Academician in the National Academy of Design. A solo exhibition of his work was mounted at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1946 and his works are represented in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburg; the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; and the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta, Georgia; the Mobile Museum of Art in Mobile, Alabama; the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe; the New York Public Library, New York; the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, California; and the Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, Washington.

Carl Max Schultheiss died in 1961 in Kew Gardens, New York.