The son of a typographer, he studied art under Isaac Grünewald, the father of Swedish Modernism. During that time he travelled extensively across a war torn Europe, exhibiting the results at Karlskrona in 1944 alongside the painter Olle Ängkvist. More shows followed and his modernist figure groups proved popular throughout the 1950s but in later life his work grew more conventional and he became a more mainstream, commercial artist. He was a muralist and published poet whose life formed the basis for two biographical books by his son Thomas Wahlberg. His paintings hang in the permanent collection of the Swedish Museum of Modern Art and the Trelleborg Museum.