As the daughter of a member of parliament in Budapest, Grete Csaki-Copony was able to attend two private art schools. She lived in Berlin in 1911 and 1912, where she studied at the drawing and painting school of the Association of lady artists. In 1916, she attended the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts for several months. In 1917 she married Richard Csaki. She was given her first solo exhibition in 1918 in Hermannstadt.
In 1924, Csaki-Copony went to France to attend the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In 1926 she struck up a friendship with Gabriele Münter. From 1927 to 1932, Csaki-Copony was a student at the painting school run by Arthur Segal in Berlin. She took part in numerous exhibitions in Munich and Berlin, including the exhibition Die schaffende Frau in der bildenden Kunst (“The creative woman in the visual arts”) in the Künstlerhaus in Berlin alongside Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter, Paula Modersohn-Becker and Annot Jacobi. After moving to Stuttgart in 1934, Csaki-Copony experimented in arts and crafts, and trained in pottery on the Schwäbische Alb.
In 1935, Csaki-Copony took part successfully in an exhibition in the Galerie Nierendorf in Berlin, but she cancelled exhibitions in Stuttgart and Tübingen that same year because she disagreed with Nazi interference in the organisation of them. The Nazis declared her work to be “degenerate” and “Bolshevist”. She began giving private lessons to Jewish women artists who had been excluded from the academies. Her husband died in an aeroplane accident in Italy in 1943, after which she scaled back her activities as an artist in order to provide for their children, and because she was also looking after displaced persons from among her own countrymen. From 1945 to 1948, she painted only flowers in order to make money. She and her family moved to Athens in 1954. Csaki-Copony returned to Berlin in 1962.
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