Luca was born in Bucharest, the son of a Jewish tailor. He spoke Yiddish, Romanian, German and French. From 1938, he traveled frequently to Paris, France, where he was introduced to the Surrealist circles. World War II and the official antisemitism in Romania forced him into local exile. During the short pre-Communist period of Romanian independence, he founded a Surrealist artists group, together with Gellu Naum , Paun , Theodorescu and Dolfi Trost.
His first publications, including poems in French followed. He was the inventor of cubomania and, with Dolfi Trost, the author of the 1945 statement "Dialetic of Dialectic". Harassed in Romania and caught while trying to flee the country, the self-called "étran-juif" ("StranJew") finally left Romania in 1952, and moved to Paris through Israel.
In 1994, he was expelled from his apartment, officially for hygiene reasons. Luca, who had spent forty years in France without papers, could not react. On February 9, at the age of 80, he committed suicide by jumping in the Seine.
Works include
Most of his poetic works were written in French. There are no known translation of his poem collections into English.
Un loup à travers une loupe , Bucharest, 1942. Poems in prose, initially published in Romanian. Later translated into French by Gherasim Luca. Apart from Ce Château Pressenti , they remained unpublished in French until 1998, Éditions José Corti
Quantitativement aimée , Éditions de l'Oubli, Bucharest, 1944
Le Vampire passif , Éditions de l'Oubli, Bucharest 1945
