Walter Wellington Quirt was born to Arthur Quirt and Theresa McDowell on November 24, 1902 in the small mining town of Iron River, Michigan. Far removed from any traces of civilization, Iron River was for Quirt a place as bleak and unkind as its name. Quirt's family had little money and limited contact with the life of culture or art, yet Quirt managed to find a creative flame within himself, for although the schools in his rough hometown provided no art training, Quirt began drawing well before he had entered his teens. According to his widow Eleanor, Quirt "was for a long time colored by Iron River."

In 1921, Quirt left Iron River to attend the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee. His progress there led to part-time work as a drawing instructor, and by 1926, Quirt was teaching novice classes and outdoor sketching. While at the School, Quirt produced his earliest watercolors, and his paintings were exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1926 and in the International Watercolor exhibitions of 1929. During this time, Quirt also studied at the McDowell Colony in New Hampshire but his formal training went no further, allowing him the independence to experiment stylistically throughout a very prolific and eclectic career.

Quirt left Milwaukee for New York City in 1929, a change he had long looked forward to. His arrival in the city coincided with the onset of the Great Depression, and soon he was involved in the radical causes that would influence his work throughout the 1930s. Within a year such leading leftwing periodicals as New Masses, New Pioneer and Art Front were publishing his socially and politically engaged drawings. Quirt's future paintings would evolve from these illustrations.

In 1931, Quirt married Martha Pearse of Milwaukee. The following year, Quirt became secretary of the art section of the John Reed Club, an organization associated with the Communist Party USA and committed to encouraging young, leftist talent. Appealing to the art section's affiliates across the country, Quirt created newsletters calling for an increase in politically- and socially-themed artwork. In February 1933, along with one-hundred other artists, he contributed to the John Reed Club's first art exhibition titled The Social Viewpoint in Art.

Though Quirt had work creating sketches and murals, he needed a stable income to survive the Great Depression. In October 1935, Quirt landed a position with the New York City branch of the Works Progress Administration/Federal Art Project, which kept him employed for the next seven years. During this time, Quirt painted small panels that echoed influences ranging from Diego Rivera and Jose Orozco to Salvador Dali and de Chirico. In February 1936, New York's exclusive Julien Levy Gallery held Quirt's first solo-exhibition with sixteen works reflecting the cultural and economic tone of both the American Artists' Congress and the current New York art scene. In defending the decision to exhibit an obscure social-surrealist, a spokesperson affirmed that the work of the gallery's "first radical painter" was not only fresh and innovative but also of profound social and political importance (Swanson 19).

The success of this show paved the way for Quirt's future artistic endeavors. In January 1937, Quirt participated in a panel with Dali at the Museum of Modern Art on "Surrealism and Its Political Significance." Here Quirt voiced his candid Marxist views, arguing that Dali's doctrines on Surrealism paralleled those of Fascism and that human emotions could be divided into a dichotomy of fascist or revolutionary ideologies. (Swanson 19). Although critics took offense, Quirt stood true to his radical beliefs.

By the late 1930s, however, the Freudian analysis that he had begun in 1935 led to dramatic changes in Quirt's opinions and art. While painting murals for Bellevue Hospital in 1937 and 1938, Quirt, now divorced, met and fell in love with Eleanor Falk, an assistant to the mural project. In 1939, they married. With his outlook changing, Quirt sought out the Pinacotheca Gallery, and in 1941, began painting and writing newsletters for the gallery. His comments in these newsletters on 1930s art suggested the reasons for his departure from Marxism. In "Social Content vs. Art," for example, he questioned whether a direct social-surrealist portrayal of society and politics in painting could count as art, or if a more indirect approach using "art's language" would be more effective (Swanson 21). His time under Freudian analysis along with his disillusionment with the Communist Party after the Soviet-Nazi pact of 1939 both contributed to his changed political and artistic stance.

With his wife and newborn son Andrew, Quirt left New York City for Milwaukee in mid-1944 to resume work as a teacher at the Layton School of Art, a move which Mrs. Quirt describes as a "screaming disaster." It was in Milwaukee that Quirt's ten-year long drinking problem began, getting so bad some nights that he would make threats to Mrs. Quirt of jumping off their apartment's fire escape at night. According to Mrs. Quirt, "Walter was fun, prankish, a delight the first five years, but when he hit alcohol he was a mess." The following year Quirt moved his family to East Lansing, Michigan for another teaching position at Michigan State University, where he taught until 1947. A second son, Peter, was born in 1948, and the youngest, Jonathan, in 1952. Although the two teaching positions allowed Quirt to provide for his growing family with his first steady salary since leaving the WPA/FAP in 1942, the increased workload and his growing drinking habit led to a sense of isolation during his time in Wisconsin and Michigan (Eleanor Quirt).

Despite his unhappiness in the Midwest, Quirt continued painting and writing productively. He had exhibitions at the Duveem-Graham Gallery in 1957, the Greer Gallery in 1963. With a grant from the Ford Foundation, the American Federation of Arts sponsored the "Walter Quirt Retrospective," in which forty-two of his pieces traveled throughout the United States between 1960 and 1962. In 1967 the University of Michigan presented him with a grant to spend a quarter in an isolated area of the Yucatan to develop his ideas on composition and design by studying the "linear preferences" of the local population (Swanson 25). Mrs. Quirt says that while Walter was there, he resided in "some shack that a woman had died in. It was moist, so the acrylic paint wouldn't dry and he came home with intestinal parasites and lung problems." In 1967, Quirt fell ill with lung cancer; 'he was a smoker and that's what did him in" says Mrs. Quirt. He died on March 19, 1968 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Throughout his life Quirt's passion for new ideas only increased with time and he was working diligently to expand his oeuvre even at the end of his life. Mrs. Quirt affectionately describes her late husband as an "Irish imp"--full of life, confrontational and passionate, constantly "explor[ing] various modes of communication through visual means." Quirt's unpredictable personality coincided with his ever-changing artistic style.