Born in Mostaganem, Algeria in 1931, Benanteur started drawing and painting in 1943, enrolling in the painting studios of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Oran. He visits Paris and settles there in 1953. He has exhibited in France and internationally since 1957. In 1962, he starts his printmaking career and illustrates the works of several French poets, including his wife's, Monique Boucher, who is also a painter. He has worked as a Professor at the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Paris and at the Ecole des Arts decoratifs. He lives and works in Paris.

"His splendid oeuvre, universal in its reach, is not only limited to the recurrent viewing of the surroundings of Mostaganem. That is the departure point for a journeying which the artist invites us to share with him. Our eye is forever flickering, marvelling, unable to distinguish the abstract from the figurative, every canvas providing, from one moment to another, a new approach: and so they are revealed to us, multiple, polymorphs, harbingers of mystery, which, like every major work of art be it dramatic, symphonic, poetic or literary, is so rich that one can decode it and interpret it in various ways."

Excerpt from Marc Hérissé. "Prologue." In Benanteur: Peintures, ed. Claude Lemand. Paris: Editions CLEA, 2002.