Harold Altman was born in New York City in 1924. He attended the Art Students League, the Black Mountain College, the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris, and was a graduate of the Cooper Union Art School. In 1962 he moved to the central Pennsylvanian village of Lemont, where a nineteenth century frame church served as his studio. Altman spent one third of each year working in Paris where his lithographs were printed at Atelier DesJobert, his etchings at Atelier George LeBlanc.

The artist's works have been exhibited at numerous galleries and museums, both in the United States and abroad. He is represented in nearly every significant collection in the world, including New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney and Brooklyn Museums. His work is to be found in many museum collections outside of the United States, several of which are the Victoria and Albert Museum of London, the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam, the Kunst Museum of Basel, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Copenhagen and the Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris. Altman received numerous awards, grants and fellowships. Among them are two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Tamarind Lithography Fellowship, a National Institute of the Arts and Letters Award, a Fulbright-Hayes Senior Research Fellowship for work in France and a National Endowment for the Arts Grant.

Harold Altman died in July of 2003 in Centre County, Pennsylvania