At the age of thirteen, Abraham Mintchine worked as an apprentice goldsmith in Kiev. He started to paint when he was sixteen years old. In 1923, he left Russia for Berlin, where he dealt with scenography and designed costumes for the Jewish theater. According to art critics, the works that he presented at his first exhibition in Berlin were reminiscent of the Cubist style. Unfortunately, no paintings of that time have survived.

Mintchine arrived in Paris in 1926 with his wife Sonia, who was an opera singer. He adopted an expressionist technique. Their daughter Irène was born two years later. Mintchine settled at 89 rue de la Glacière and immediately became friends with the group of Russian artists living in Montparnasse, who he had already met in Berlin: Mikhail Larionov, Nathalie Gontcharova, and Maurice Blond.

His first exhibitions took place at the Alice Manteau gallery in 1928 and at Zborovski’s in 1929. He was a friend of painter Othon Friesz. He stayed in the south of France, in La Garde, near Toulon, where he died suddenly of a heart attack on 1931.