Arthur Osver was born in Chicago, Illinois on July 6, 1912. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago between 1931 and 1936 with Boris Anisfeld. In 1940, Arthur Osver settled in New York's Greenwich Village and went on to teach at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and then Columbia University. He was awarded the Prix de Rome in 1952, and he visited Italy and France a number

Osver also taught at Yale University and Cooper Union in New York in the late 1950s. Over the decades, his paintings evolved from urban realism, focusing on the smoke-stacks, to a more abstract style, emphasizing the wisps of smoke. He was associated with the Abstract Expressionist during the 1950s.

Osver moved to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1960, hired as Professor of Art at Washington University until his retirement in 1981. He was the third high-profile artist attracted to the university by Dean Kenneth Hudson, who also hired Max Beckmann and Philip Guston.

Osver's paintings have been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. Life magazine ran a full-page reproduction of one painting, and Fortune magazine commissioned another for its cover story on the “Chemical Century”—“a feather in my cap,” Osver called it.

Arthur Osver died on July 24, 2006 in Webster Grove, Missouri.