František Drtikol was born and raised in the Central Bohemian town of Príbram. After showing early promise in drawing and painting, his father arranged an apprenticeship with a local portrait photographer. Drtikol honed his skills at the Teaching and Research Institute of Photography in Munich (1901-03), where he encountered avant-garde European art movements, including Symbolism, Art Nouveau/ Jugendstil, and Pictorialist photography. After graduating at the top of his class, Drtikol worked for a series of Swiss and Czech photo studios and served three years in the military before opening his portrait studio in his hometown (1907). After moving his business to Prague in 1910, Drtikol met with great success, and his clientele included many prominent Czech politicians and celebrities.

The financial security that portraiture provided allowed Drtikol to develop the personal body of work that earned him acclaim. While his early images utilize Pictorialism's soft focus and elaborate sets, by the 1920s, he developed his own unique, modernist approach. In his studies of nude women, Drtikol drew upon a variety of contemporary influences, including Expressionism, Futurism, Cubism, and Art Deco, as well as modern dance. Blending aspects of these movements, he expertly utilized light and shadow and carefully arranged, geometric wooden forms and props to create abstracted compositions that accentuate the eroticism of his models' poses. After winning the Grand Prix at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Drtikol quickly received international attention. While he continued to exhibit his nudes across Europe and in the United States, Drtikol began to create photographs composed of elongated, idealized cut-out female figures situated in various poses. While these practices need to be reexamined by present-day curators, scholars, and viewers, found that these symbolic women better captured the spiritual/mystical themes and compositional qualities that he sought to achieve and by 1930 he ceased to use live models.

Drtikol's studio and photography suffered greatly from the economic effects of the American Great Depression. Becoming more focused on spirituality, he closed his studio and gave up photography in 1935, devoting himself instead to painting, meditation, and translating Buddhist and Tibetan religious literature. While he faded into obscurity during the last 30 years of his life, he is today celebrated as one of the significant figures in modern Czech photography's development. Today, Drtikol's photographs are in many public collections, including the Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague; Oloumec Museum of Art, Czech Republic; Tate Britain, London; Musée d'Orsay, Paris; Centre Pompidou, Paris; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Art Institute of Chicago; and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.