Thomas M. Messer was born on 9 February 1920 in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia [now Slovakia]. He was married to Remedios Garcia. He died on 15 May 2013 in Manhattan, New York, USA.
He served in the US Army in Europe as an interrogator for military intelligence. After the war, he remained in Europe, and studied art for the first time at the Sorbonne. He earned a master's degree in art history at Harvard.