As a child, de Creeft moved with his family to Barcelona, and it was there he began sculpting in 1895. During the next five years he was apprenticed to a carver of religious figures and also worked in a bronze factory. In 1900, he and his family moved to Madrid, where he was apprenticed again, this time to the official government sculptor, Augustine Querol. De Creeft opened his own studio in 1902, but three years later went to Paris and, on the advice of Rodin, entered the Acad‚mie Julian, where he won the Concours de Sculpture in 1906. He next worked and studied at La Maison Greber in Paris from 1911 to 1914, and maintained his own studio at the "Bateau Lavoir," sharing the building with Picasso and Gris, among others.
In 1915 de Creeft made a radical and lasting change in his methodology when he became an exponent of direct carving, even going so far as to destroy many of his previous, more conventionally executed works. He began exhibiting the products of his new labors in Paris in 1919, and continued to do so until he left that city in 1929. In England in that year he married an American, Alice Robertson Carr of Roanoke, Virginia, and moved to New York where de Creeft established his studio in Greenwich Village.
During the 1930s the sculptor taught in New York at the New School for Social Research and, beginning in the next decade, at the Art Students League, a position from which he did not retire until 1980. He second marriage, in 1944, was to sculptor Lorrie Goulet; two years later they opened a house and studio at Hoosick Falls, New York. De Creeft served as a vice president of the Academy, 1972-73.
Among de Creeft's major commissioned works are the War Memorial at Saugues, Puy de D"me, France, 1918; two-hundred sculptures in stone executed for La Forteleza de Ramonje, Mallorca, 1927-29; the large bronze Alice in Wonderland in Central Park, New York, 1959; and The Gift of Health to Mankind, a bronze relief at Bellevue Hospital, New York, 1967.
A major retrospective exhibition of de Creeft's work was presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1960. In 1975 he received the Florence Brevoort-Eickemeyer award, conveyed by Columbia University, on recommendation of the Academy.
