Robert Philippi was born in 1877 in Graz.

He started his art education with the theater painter Kautsky and in the private painting school Streblow in Vienna. From 1893 to 1896 he attended the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts under Griepenkerl and Trenkwald and later the Vienna School of Applied Arts under Myrbach and Roller. There he experienced a few years later, 1914/15 and from 1917 to 1920, as an assistant to Franz Cizek, founder of the Children's Drawing School and pioneer of Viennese Kinetism, a humanly as well as artistically formative time. Initially, Philippi mainly used drawing and woodcut as a medium of expression, from 1925 on he increasingly turned to painting. He was a member of the Hagenbund until 1925.

Philippi died in 1959 in Vienna.