From 1908 to 1912, he studied art at the Karlsruhe Academy, where he formed friendships with fellow students Georg Scholz and Rudolf Schlichter.
His drawings and prints of the early 1920s, sharply realistic in style, are highly critical of the social and economic order.
A trip to Berlin in 1922—during which he met George Grosz—inspired the creation of several drawings in which Hubbuch depicted himself as an observer who reacts to the urban dynamism surrounding him.
Having an affair before, Hubbuch got divorced in 1933, and Hilde, being Jewish, emigrated in the same year to Vienna (till 1938) and on via London to New York, where, varying the name to Hubbuck, she made a career as a photographer.
In the 1960s the revival of interest in figurative art brought new attention to his work, along with a reevaluation of the artists of the New Objectivity in general.