Angelos Prokopiou was born in 1909 in Alexandria. He studied law at the University of Athens and graduated in 1933. He studied painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts and then left for Paris to study history of art. He graduated from the Sorbonne in 1939 with a PhD and returned to Greece, where he joined the resistance during the German Occupation.
After the war, he practiced law and was briefly involved in politics. Since 1948, he was an art columnist for Kathimerini newspaper, where he published articles and studies until his death. He was Programme Director of the National Radio Foundation (1958-59) and later he became President of the Art Critics Association. In 1962, he published the art magazine Nees Morfes in collaboration with the art gallery of the same name.
In 1959 he was elected History of Art professor at the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens, where he taught from 1962 to 1967. He represented Greece and NTUA in many international conferences in Sweden, Italy, France, England, Yugoslavia and other countries. He gave open speeches, lectures and seminars, both in Greece and abroad, invited by the governments of the U.S.A, Israel, Netherlands and the Universities of Ravenna, Palermo and Paris.
He became widely known to the Greek public mostly by his articles, his speeches on the radio, his lectures and books, many of which were written in french or english and which were translated in many other languages. His best-known papers are: Greco and his era (1931), Recent Greek Art (1936), La peinture religieuse dans les iles Ionienes pendant le XVIIIe siècle (1939), La Signification de l 'Oeuvre de Panayotis Zographos dans la Peinture Grecque ChIChe du siecle (1939), 1821 in folk painting (1940), A Historical Introduction to Art Theory (1943), Galanis (1947), Aesthetics and Art in Europe (in 2 volumes: 1954 and 1955), Cyprus, That Hellenic Island (1954), 5.000 years of Greek Art (1957), Netherlands (1958), Aesthetics (1958), The People of the Bible (1959), The Macedonian Question in Byzantine Painting, (1962), Athens, City of the Gods (1964, published in 9 languages).
His last major work, the three-volume History of Art from 1750 to 1950, was published in 1967, a few days after his death.