Painter, printmaker, and designer Erich Louis Gruner was born in Germany in 1881. He studied at the Royal Academy of Arts in Leipzig, followed by a year of study at l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts from 1905 - 1906 under Jean-Paul Laurens.

In the 1910s he worked as a graphic artist in Leipzig, Berlin, and Munich, using woodcut, lithography, and intaglio processes. His work was published in a series of fourteen portfolio of woodcuts responding to World War I, alongside Hermann Strucke, Richard Muller, Luigi Kasimir, Willi Geiger, and several others. He traveled to France and Belgium to study European master printmakers, at which point his work took inspiration from Camille Corot and other Barbizon artists who focused on the working and lower classes, often depicting farmers, peasents, and the poor.

Fom 1930 to 1946 he was the director of the Leipzig School of Fine Arts and was a member of the Leipzig Trade Fair, for which he designed the logo. In his later years he was a freelance fine and graphic artist, and was a book and stamp designer. He died in Leipzig in 1966.