Born in Csíkszereda, his father was Béla Szász, a doctor, his mother Erzsébet Susenka. He graduated from high school in Târgu Mures, then continued his studies at the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts in 1946. He graduated in 1949 in the class of István Szőnyi.
In the 1950s he spent a year in prison on trumped-up charges. After his release he made book illustrations, illustrating 600 books between 1951 and 1960.
In 1964, his illustrations for Omar Khayyam’s Rubáiyát were selected as one of the thirty most beautiful books in the world in an international competition organised by the British Museum. In 1968, he was the visual designer for the major Hungarian historical film The Stars of Eger.
With a painting style that drew on the techniques of the classical masters and combined them with surrealist elements, he became a widely celebrated painter. From 1970, as a Hungarian citizen, he lived in Toronto and then in the USA. Returning home in 1980, he applied his talent to a new genre, porcelain, an untapped field for him, which brought him a change of perception. At the porcelain manufactory in Hollohaus, he recorded several important porcelain motifs. His imaginative, surrealistic figures in opalescent grey were combined with the line play of oriental ornamentation.