Michael Tombros was born in Athens in 1889, son of a marble sculptor from Korthio, Andros island.

In 1914 he obtained a scholarship from the estate of George Averoff which let him study at the Académie Julian in Paris under Henri Bouchard and Paul Landowski.

[2] After returning to Greece, between 1933 and 1934 Tombros published 20ός Αιώνας (20th Century), an influential magazine on the visual arts.

It was the first purely pictorial magazine in Greece, covering a range of international subjects and including criticism and commentary by artists and intellectuals such as Le Corbusier, Fernand Léger, Christian Zervos, Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas and Zacharias Papantoniou.

He played an important role in encouraging development of avant-garde art in Greece, and experimented with abstraction, cubism and surrealism.