He was educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, studying under the eye of Karol Frycz, an outstanding stage designer of the inter-war period.
Immediately after the war, he worked as a scenery designer, mostly for the Helena Modrzejewska Old Theatre (Stary Teatr im. Heleny Modrzejewskiej) in Krakow. He continued to design for the stage (primarily abstract scenery) on a regular basis through the end of the 1960s. A voyage to Paris in 1947 provided the impulse that helped him to crystallize his individual approach to painting. In 1948 he founded the GRUPA KRAKOWSKA / KRAKOW GROUP and participated in the Great Exhibition of Modern Art (Wielka Wystawa Sztuki Nowoczesnej) in Krakow.
His life in the theatre began early, when during the German occupation he created an underground experimental theatre in Krakow. This theatre acted to integrate the artistic community of the city and found a worthy heir in the CRICOT 2 Theatre, formed in 1956. Theatre, in which he would develop and test his creative ideas. Cricot 2's first premiere was MATWA / THE CUTTLEFISH, after Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (1956), a production in which Kantor cleverly juxtaposed the piece's sublime text against found objects and the primitive environment of a café audience. With the play UMARLA KLASA / THE DEAD CLASS, Kantor developed another phase in his theatre, a direction the artist named the "Theatre of Death." It is this phase that includes what are considered the artist's most exceptional and best known productions, including WIELOPOLE, WIELOPOLE (1980), NIECH SZCZEZNA ARTYSCI / LET THE ARTISTS VANISH (1985), NIGDY JUZ TU NIE POWROCE / I SHALL NEVER RETURN HERE (1988), and the posthumously produced DZIS SA MOJE URODZINY / TODAY IS MY BIRTHDAY (1991), the primary motif of which is death, transcendence, as well as memory and the history inscribed in memory. The productions of the "Theatre of Death" highlighted a concept present in Kantor's entire oeuvre, namely, his concept of "Reality of a Lower Order", "which continuously demands that I examine and express issues through low status substance, the lowest possible, substance that is poor, deprived of dignity, prestige, that is defenseless and often simply contemptible."

Immediately after World War II, Kantor found himself among those who created the YOUNG VISUAL ARTISTS' GROUP (1945), and once again demonstrated his penchant for organization following the "thaw" of the mid 1950s by contributing to the reactivation of the pre-war KRAKOW GROUP (1957). He provided the impulse for the creation of the Krzysztofory Gallery, one of the country's first post-war galleries to present contemporary art, and was involved in organizing the 1ST MODERN ART EXHIBITION (Krakow, 1948). He was an animator of artistic life, an art theoretician and practitioner, a painter (including an impassioned promoter of Tashism), and one of Poland's first creators of happenings. Above all, however, he was a man of the theatre, a playwright, director, scenery designer, and actor.

Assessments of the artist's output in areas other than theatre, including his achievements as a painter, vary widely. His vision of art derived primarily from his search for means of artistic expression that would meet the challenges of contemporary times. Kantor expressed this as early as 1945, joining with Mieczyslaw Porebski to publish a manifesto on "exponential realism." In this document Kantor encouraged artists to take risks in the name of creative freedom, underlined the importance of experimentation, and accented the need for artists to remain independent from ideological and political pressures (himself following this lesson by not leading a cultural life in public throughout the Socialist Realist period).

Kantor himself strived to live by these principles in his own way, namely, by absorbing any and all novelties, skillfully assimilating that which was useful to him, and transforming and modifying it if necessary. For a relatively long period, Kantor the painter was a medium, processing the artistic impulses that came to Poland from Western Europe (in 1947 he visited Paris). As a result, his output in this area was not independent. For a brief time immediately after the war he created figurative paintings filled with grotesquely simplified figures. The gloomy mood of these images was underlined by dark colors and rough textures (KOMPOZYCJA / COMPOSITION, 1944-45). This was followed by a period during which he produced dynamic metaphorical compositions characterized by economic use of cool colors. These works resembled those that Maria Jarema and Jonasz Stern were created at approximately the same time (PONAD-RUCHY / SUPRA-MOVEMENTS, 1948).

In the second half of the 1950s, Kantor mainly produced the vigorously painted Tashist canvasses discussed previously. These paintings are mesmerizing in their own way for their visual qualities, generated with vibrating spots of paint, lines, and colors. At the same time they convey the impression that the artist treated painting in a "utilitarian" manner (OAHU, 1957), though at the same time Kantor described these works in his writings as "secretions" of his inner self. Their originality did not go unnoticed by foreign critics, including the French, who constituted the most significant critical milieu at the time (towards the end of the 1950s Kantor exhibited his paintings in western cities, Paris among them, with a measure of success).

Somewhat later the artist turned his attention to creating numerous assemblages and emballages - half-spatial compositions in which used, oftentimes destroyed objects (envelopes, bags, umbrellas) were applied to the canvas and transformed the paintings into reliefs (MR. V PRADO - INFANTKA / MR. V PRADO - THE INFANTA, 1965; EMBALLAGE, 1967). Figures reappeared in these same paintings - though they were deformed, depicted in sketch-form, "hidden" under umbrellas in dynamic and symbolic gestures of self-defense (AMBALAZ - PRZEDMIOTY, POSTACIE / EMBALLAGE - OBJECTS, FIGURES, 1967). Thus the umbrella, this degraded object so highly esteemed by Kantor ("a manifestation of a reality of lower rank"), unable to fulfill its original and real function, surprisingly regains its use in the world of art. Kantor's many painting series dating from the 1970s and 80s exhibit clear links to his theatrical activities, which he continued to pursue at the same time. For example, while working on UMARLA KLASA / THE DEAD CLASS, which premiered in 1975, Kantor created a series of paintings of the same title. Later the artist would devote himself primarily to theatre, resuming painting in the last years of his life. These last works depict a solitary human figure, shown - as in new figural art - in a single "stage" gesture. Characterized by cool colors, they refer to the artist's personal experiences (see the series DALEJ JUZ NIC / NOTHING BEYOND THIS, 1987-88).

Kantor's credits also include the organization of a series of para-theatrical actions that anticipated many of the phenomena that would eventually constitute the polyphonic art of the 1960s and 70s. Among these were his environments (the "anti-exhibition" titled WYSTAWA POPULARNA / POPULAR EXHIBITION at Krakow's Krzysztofory Gallery, 1963) and numerous happenings (LINIA PODZIALU / DIVIDING LINE, Krzysztofory Gallery, 1966; PANORAMICZNY HAPPENING MORSKI / PANORAMIC SEASIDE HAPPENING, PLENER KOSZALINSKI W OSIEKACH / THE KOSZALIN PLEIN-AIR MEETING IN OSIEKI, 1967; LIST / THE LETTER, Foksal Gallery, Warsaw, 1968; LEKCJA ANATOMII WG REMBRANDTA / AN ANATOMY LESSON ACCORDING TO REMBRANDT, Nuremberg Kunsthalle, 1968, Foksal Gallery, 1969). Kantor also went through a fascination for Conceptualism (see WIELKIE KRZESLO / THE GREAT CHAIR designed for the 1970 Wroclaw Symposium).

An abundance of literature has been devoted to Kantor the artist. Noteworthy titles include Wieslaw Borowski's book "Tadeusz Kantor" (1982), Mieczyslaw Porebski's "Deska" / "Wooden Board" (1997), a volume of studies by various authors titled "W cieniu krzesla" / "In the Shadow of the Chair" (1997), as well as documentation of the painter's collaborative projects with Warsaw's Foksal Gallery (1999).